Zip using Oracle Stored Procedure

Question

Right now I am using Oracle utility procedure, UTL_COMPRESS.LZ_COMPRESS(), to compress some data. But the problem is it compresses the thing using GZIP compatib

Answer 1

UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW is not any sort of compression algorithm. No idea where you came up with the idea that it was. RAW (and its larger cousin BLOB) are simply was of storing data that isn't a number, date or a string. You don't want to store binary data in strings because there's a chance of character conversion issues.

The correct PL/SQL package for compression is UTL_COMPRESS which uses the standard Lempel-Ziv algorithm.

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/appdev.112/e16760/u_compr.htm#BGBBCDDI