thanks Sergey

That makes sense. I am basically compressing XML files storing in a cursor with Blob field, and compressing the resulting cursor. Looks like doing this will gain me approximately 83% time savings in transferring data over a vpn connection to speed up database synchronization compared to not doing the compression. Hence the compression string would be binary.

>The CURSORTOXML() considers Blob, Memo/Binary and varbinary to be a binary data and uses BASE64 encoding on them. The BASE64 encoding will increase the size by about 30%.
>The Memo is a character field and is included in XML w/o changes. A binary data in a memo will cause XML to become invalid.
>You cannot expect 28MB of data to be compressed into 4KB. Most likely 4KB file was truncated.
>