https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Health-and-Life-Sciences/BLOB-data-type/m-p/54544#M1448 There is no actual BLOB data type in Base SAS, but is has been considered for SPDS. You can read BLOB data types from external RDBMS, but the SAS/ACCESS engine will convert them into char variables. Since the maximum length for char in Base SAS is 32K, I guess you have to split your data into several rows/columns. Apart from that, you have an observation lenght limit to handle: 2GB.<BR /> <BR /> /Linus Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:00:15 GMT LinusH 2008-10-16T09:00:15Z https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Health-and-Life-Sciences/BLOB-data-type/m-p/54543#M1447 Is the BLOB data type available in SAS Base? I am trying to concatenate patient notes for multiple records. For example, a patient has 50 records, each with a clinical note that may be up to 40K characters. If I combine all notes into one record then I could have up to 400K characters. I have written a program in VBA to do this but I am running into a field size issue. Can I use the BLOB data type to combine a patient's multiple notes into one note? Thanks. Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:23:21 GMT https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Health-and-Life-Sciences/BLOB-data-type/m-p/54543#M1447 deleted_user 2008-10-16T06:23:21Z https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Health-and-Life-Sciences/BLOB-data-type/m-p/54544#M1448 There is no actual BLOB data type in Base SAS, but is has been considered for SPDS. You can read BLOB data types from external RDBMS, but the SAS/ACCESS engine will convert them into char variables. Since the maximum length for char in Base SAS is 32K, I guess you have to split your data into several rows/columns. Apart from that, you have an observation lenght limit to handle: 2GB.<BR /> <BR /> /Linus Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:00:15 GMT https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Health-and-Life-Sciences/BLOB-data-type/m-p/54544#M1448 LinusH 2008-10-16T09:00:15Z