The RAW datatype is used to store strings of byte-oriented data.
The difference between a RAW and a VARCHAR2 string is that Oracle does no character set translation on raw data.
Thus if you are retrieving raw data from an Oracle server using ASCII to a machine using the EBCDIC character set, no translation would be done.
The Syntax for the RAW Datatype
variable_name RAW(size);
size is the size, in bytes, of the variable.
size must be a number between 1 and 32767.
Here are some sample declarations:
some_data RAW(255);
Like VARCHAR2, the maximum length of a RAW variable is 32767 bytes.