FDM: Handling BLOB/CLOB/LONG data Type

Products

• CA Test Data Manager (Data Finder / Grid Tools)

Issue/Introduction

Can Fast Data Masker (FDM) and Datamaker mask data that is in BLOB/CLOB and LONG Datatype formats?

Environment

CA Test Data Manager (TDM) 4.9 and greater
Fast Data Masker (FDM) 4.9 and greater

Resolution

For FDM:
Masking scripts for CLOB and BLOB with Oracle is supported as of FDM 4.6.200.22. Most customers use CLOB as a replacement for the Long data type since it is no longer supported by Oracle. 

RANDOMBLOB is the only function we currently support for masking BLOB data.

The RANDOMBLOB function randomly takes BLOB data from a file in the BLOBS sub-directory and loads into this BLOB column. This must contain files of the type of data you want to mask for example .pdf or .gif.
See this documentation for more details: Masking Functions and Parameters

For Datamaker:
The CLOB data type is supported in Datamaker for creating Test Data Marts and as a filter option in creating transformation maps.
For more information see:

• Construct Test Data Mart
• Filter Options for Transformation Maps

 

The BLOB variable is supported in transformation maps.
For more information, see:

• 'DateTime expression function' in: Filter Options for Transformation Maps

If you wish to see more capabilities in either product specific to CLOB or BLOB field masking, please submit an enhancement request using the steps detailed in this document: 
How to Submit an Enhancement Request for Test Data Manager

 

Currently, there is no support for the LONG datatype for oracle is this is provided by Oracle only for Backward compatibility.
The LONG datatype stores variable-length character strings containing up to two gigabytes, but with many restrictions.
This datatype is provided for backward compatibility with existing applications; in general, new applications should use CLOB and NCLOB datatypes to store large amounts of character data.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A58617_01/server.804/a58241/ch5.htm#:~:text=The%20LONG%20datatype%20stores%20variable,gigabytes%2C%20but%20with%20many%20restrictions.&text=This%20datatype%20is%20provided%20for,large%20amounts%20of%20character%20data.

 

Additional Information

There is a video attached on doing masking on CLOB and BLOB using FDM on oracle.