Re: Saving images in Oracle 8i

I store photographs in an Oracle database. There are thousands of them, which suggests the use of BLOBS (Oracle is better at internally storing thousands of small objects than your average file system is). If I had just a few hundred, I'd have gone the BFILE route (same reason, but in reverse... file systems are better at looking after fewer large objects than Oracle).

Now for the embarrasing part: I view my photographs through an Access front-end (ie, link tables, create a form based on the linked table, and place a bound object frame on the form).

If I could summon up the energy to learn it, I confidently expect Oracle Forms would allow you to do prec isely the same thing, wothout all the iffiness of an ODBC link to the database.

So yes, it's perfectly possible to do. When you get into serious developing, you can investigate DBMS_LOB, which has all the hooks needed to work with these things.

(Just one word of warning: many image controls -and I speak from bitter experience with Access- used to display BLOBS have an uncanny habit of sending an uncompressed bitstream to the back end. When you think you're saving a 75K JPEG, the front end is actually sending something like a 750K data stream to the database. Fortunately, there are workarounds: for example, www.dbpix.com has an ActiveX control (for Access) that sends the compressed format to the backend. There are other (free) workarounds, too).

Regards
HJR "Lisa McGrath" <lmcgrath_at_uwsa.edu> wrote in message news:3D514985.FCE7C84E_at_uwsa.edu...
>
> 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
> --
> Lisa McGrath
> Lmcgrath_at_uwsa.edu (608) 263-4535
> Office of Information Services
> University of Wisconsin System Administration
> --
>
>
Received on Wed Aug 07 2002 - 17:51:14 CDT