This default behavior can be changed with fbsql_set_lob_mode() so the fetch functions will return handles to BLOB and CLOB data.
fbsql_read_blob() reads BLOB data from the database. If a select statement contains BLOB and/or BLOB columns FrontBase will return the data directly when data is fetched. This default behavior can be changed with fbsql_set_lob_mode() so the fetch functions will return handles to BLOB and CLOB data. If a handle is fetched a user must call fbsql_read_blob() to get the actual BLOB data from the database.