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If, to you, a BLOB is something which traps Steve McQueen in a diner, DBBlobEditor may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you instantly see BLOB as "Binary Large Object", this program might pique your interest.

Quickly summarized, a BLOB is a means of storing data of arbitrary size and type in a database, such as a picture, a video file, a text field of indeterminate length, an entire Word document, and so on. Normally, you edit this via whatever program you use for data entry, but sometimes you just have a raw data file, or for whatever reason, the initial program is unavailable. DBBlobEditor allows you to open databases directly, including but not limited to Access, SQL, and anything with an ODBC driver, and see your tables and their data.

DBBlobEditor is also capable of parsing and interpreting many different formats which might be stored in a BLOB field, so that you can see the picture or read the text, edit it, and save it back into the database. It is also capable of editing non-BLOB fields.

Of course, what it does not provide, nor can it, is any kind of business logic or data checking, aside from the fairly limited amount built into the data structure itself. A careless user can render a database file hopelessly useless by changing fields which should not be changed or entering values beyond permitted ranges. Since DBBlobEditor respects all normal security parameters--if a database is password protected, you will need the password to edit it--only those who are assumed trustworthy to edit the data can do so, but even so, caution is advised.

A program like DBBlobEditor is likely to be of use on a daily basis only to those who regularly work with data apart from the front end programs used by most, but it can also be a valuable emergency tool, as well as an easy way to see how a particular database is put together. Given the low cost, it is well worth checking out for the trial period.

--Ian Harac