Searching through BLOBS & BFILES

Hi,
I am not 100% sure what the best solution would be, so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

I usually develop in MS tools, such as .net, ASP, SQL Server etc..., but I really want to expand my skillset and learn as much about Oracle as possible.

What I need to do, is design a DB that will index and store approximately 300 word docs, each with a size no more that 400KB. They need to be able to seacrh the word documents for keyword/phrases to be able to identify which one to use.

So, I need to write 2 web interfaces. A front end and a back end. Front end for the users who will search for their documents, and a backend for an admin person to upload new/ammended documents to the DB to be searchable.

NOW..... I could do this in the usual MS tools that I work with using BLOB's and the built in Full-text searching that comes with SQL Server, but i don't have these to work with.

What I was hoping someone could help me out with was identifying the best possible solution to use.

1. Should I use a BLOB or BFILE data type & why would i use one over the other?
2. Does Oracle 8 support full text searching of a word document once it is loaded into the *LOB column & how would I do this?
3. Is there a way to export the Word Doc From the *LOB colum and dump it into a PDF format (I guess I am asking if someone has seen or written a PDF generator script for Oracle)?

If someone could help me out, it would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,
James Received on Sun Jun 11 2006 - 18:34:47 CDT