First I appreciated for those who responded to my original posting. So far I still haven't found a solution but yet learned a few new things and would like to share with everyone. For those who didn't read my previous message, my problem was trying to use a Zope external method and doing a blob insertion into Oracle (8.0.5 on Solaris). I'm using the DCOracle compiled with VC6 on a NT platform. With DCOracle I could create the connection and query the database without any problem for any kind of datatypes including blob. When trying to perform a insertion, it keeps reporting a "invalid hex string" error. Now here's what I found so far. When I was searching for a solution for my problem, I came across the mxODBC driver. I created a standalone Python script that makes use of mxODBC driver and successfully inserted data blobs of any size (>10M). So I thought that I could copy the mxODBC package from python\lib\ODBC to Zope (under Shared\ODBC\) and access it via an external method. Then I found a naming conflict with the Zope odbc driver. I went ahead and renamed the odbc.pyd to win32odbc.pyd. Next I tried to import the mxODBC driver in my external method as: import Shared.ODBC from Shared.ODBC import Windows dbc = Shared.ODBC.Windows.Connect('user','password','dsn',clear_auto_commit=1) When the external method is executed, I got an error message "Error Type:AttributeError ErrorValue: Connect". If I successfully imported the module, shouldn't I have access to the connection method? Anyone has any idea on what I've done wrong? Also I would like to find out if there's anyone successfully using DCOracle with Oracle 8.0.5 (on any platform) to insert blob. Please comment. Thanks -Cheuk