It's a big world, and it's getting bigger every day, at least when it comes to the types of data challenging relational databases. The kinds of data that enterprises need to deal with have changed in the past ten or fifteen years. As the multimedia revolution unfolds, there's an increasing need to store pictures, videos, documents, graphics, schematics, and other such non-traditional data in a relational database. A standard employee table consisting of name, identifier, years of service, and location might also need to include a picture and, perhaps, even a signature. Table containing movie information might also want to include the video itself or at least clips from the video.

To facilitate this growing demand, the Teradata Database has implemented Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) and Character Large Objects (CLOBs).