PL/SQL Developer - ignore/limit large data in queries

Question

In PL/SQL Developer v7.1.x, is there way way to ignore large data types in queries or the "Query Data" feature. For example: If you right click on table FOO, and select "Query Data" this will execute a SELECT * FROM FOO. If that table contains BLOB data the query will take a while to complete and temporarily lock up the application. This is especially problematic when querying remote databases (for obvious reasons).

I would like a way to tell PL/SQL Developer not to retrieve large data by default. I know there is a way to limit the ResultSet size but this doesn't do what I am looking for.

I could just select each column I wanted ignoring certain ones but then I couldn't use the "Query Data" feature.

Thanks.

Answer 1

No, the Query Data feature does one thing and one thing only - queries all the data.

What you might find useful is that you can drag the name of a table or view from the Browser into a SQL Window, choose "Select" from the menu that pops up, and it will generate a SELECT statement on the table with all the column names included - but does not execute the query straight away. You can then edit it however you like (e.g. comment out the LOB columns) before you run it.

Answer 2

I know that Toad has something like that built in, but I'm not aware of a PL/SQL Developer option that disables BLOBS.

The option you are left with, for now, is to simply select all the columns individually and truncate the blob.

ie:

select foo, bar, trunc(baz,100) from foo where ...

Answer 3

Create a View that doesn't contain the blob column or whatever columns you don't routinely want to look at.