Handling Large Objects in the Database : Introduction « Large Objects « Oracle PL/SQL Tutorial

To address performance concerns, Oracle provides two options:

You can store the large objects internally, within the database itself (CLOB, BLOB).

You can keep the objects in the file system and just store the filenames in the database (BFILE).

CLOB (character large object): to store large amounts of character (text) information.

BLOB (binary large object): to store binary (mostly video/audio) information in the database.