Back in the "old days", the types of data that databases were required to store were fairly straight forward--text, numbers, maybe a true/false field. Modern database users, however, want to store all sorts of things in databases. Music files, specialized graphics, even video footage can be stored as fields in a database. How do DBMSs (Database Management Systems) handle all these different file types? One solution is to store data as a BLOB--a binary large object. Data stored as a BLOB is stored in the database in binary format, the same format used to represent the data in computer memory. Because every type of data can be expressed in binary format, any type of data can be stored as a BLOB, making the format extremely flexible and popular for storing diversely formatted data.
