Saving images in Oracle 8i

I've been asked to do research on using our Oracle 8i database (8.1.7.2 running on UNIX AIX) for document management. A department wants to scan in an image of a document and save that image in the database.

When reading Oracle documentation it talks about storing images as BLOB or using a BFILE pointer. I did a google search of this newsgroup and people suggested using Oracle's InterMedia for storing images. Now I'm confused as to which would be the best approach. InterMedia looked like the tool to use if you were using the internet, but this application won't be run over the internet. Using a BLOB or BFILE would allow us to store the images without purchasing another Oracle product, but how do you store the image and get it back? You couldn't do an SQL select and expect to see an image returned.

Is anyone using Oracle to store images, and how do you store and retrieve your images?

Thanks for any pointers. This is a totally new area for us.

Lisa
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Lisa McGrath
Lmcgrath_at_uwsa.edu (608) 263-4535
Office of Information Services
University of Wisconsin System Administration
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Received on Wed Aug 07 2002 - 11:23:33 CDT