JDBC supports an abstraction of LOB locators through the BLOB and CLOB classes. LOB locators allow the client to request data from a specific offset in the LOB without having to retrieve the data in between. For details, see the section LOB Locators in the chapter "Understanding JDBC Connectivity" in the Connectivity Guide.

With OpenAPI, an application can request a reference to the long data, called a locator, by setting the IIAPI_QF_LOCATOR flag when calling IIapi_query().  Locators are 4-byte integer values that reference the long data where it resides in the database. For details, see the section LOB Locators in the chapter "Introduction" in the OpenAPI User Guide.