Viewing BLOBs in SQL Developer as Text

I have talked about how to preview BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) as pictures…

But someone on Stackoverflow asked how to read a BLOB value if it had text.

So I spooled the content of my EMPLOYEES table to a txt file, as CSV, and then loaded that to a table as a BLOB.

Then I browsed the table, double-clicked the cell…

and voila, the data being stored…

Other BLOB posts:

• setting up external editors (Adobe for PDFs?)
• Exporting multiple BLOBs
• Quickly viewing BLOBs as pictures
• Including BLOB images in your PDF reports