Easy Way to Extract BLOB data to file

[Quoted] Currently, I'm trying to extract BLOB data to file (Oracle 8.0.5 NT platform) e.g. MS Word document. I did some research, including finding out from this newgroup where someone
[Quoted] suggested calling an external procedure OutputString to dump BLOB data out. I tried this
[Quoted] out but always find it troublesome since I have many tables with BLOB columns and
everytime I have to expliclitly create new procedures just to pump the BLOB data out
for that particular column.

Question :
[Quoted] 1. Will Oracle come up with some builtin packages I can just call to extract data. I come
[Quoted] from Informix background and they have this handy way of extracting BLOB data e.g.

    SELECT LOTOFILE(col_name, 'YourPathTofile!', 'SERVER') from some_table where ....

and the data is extracted. Data Insertion is also straight forward :

    INSERT INTO some_table VALUES (1, FILETOBLOB('YourPathToFile','SERVER') ...

[Quoted] 2. Why does Oracle only provide a package procedure to load BLOB data e.g. DBMS_LOB.
    LOADFROMFILE but none for extracting data ?

    This is especially important for MSWord BLOB data (r.t. graphics data for Web use).

    I hope there is some extra support for BLOB data manipulation in Oracle [Quoted] 8.0.5 though I

    saw improvement in 8.1.5 but I can't be using it.

regards,
Aik Khoon Received on Tue Aug 17 1999 - 20:02:16 CEST