Bulk loading BLOBs using PL/SQL - is it possible?

Question

Hi -
Does anyone have a good reference article or example of how I can bulk load BLOBs (videos, images, audio, office docs/pdf) into the database using PL/SQL?
Every example I've ever seen in PL/SQL for loading BLOBs does a commit; after each file loaded ... which doesn't seem very scalable.
Can we pass in an array of BLOBs from the application, into PL/SQL and loop through that array and then issue a commit after the loop terminates?
Any advice or help is appreciated. Thanks
LJ

Answer 1

It is easy enough to modify the example to commit every N files. If you are loading large amounts of media, I think that you will find that the time to load the media is far greater than the time spent in SQL statements doing inserts or retrieves. Thus, I would not expect to see any significant benefit to changing the example to use PL/SQL collection types in order to do bulk row operations.
If your goal is high performance bulk load of binary content then I would suggest that you look to use Sqlldr. A PL/SQL program loading from BFILEs is limited to loading files that are accessible from the database server file system. Sqlldr can do this but it can also load data from a remote client. Sqlldr has parameters to control batching of operations.
See section 7.3 of the Oracle Multimedia DICOM Developer's Guide for the example Loading DICOM Content Using the SQL*Loader Utility. You will need to adapt this example to the other Multimedia objects (ORDImage, ORDAudio .. etc) but the basic concepts are the same.
Once the binary content is loaded into the database, you will need a to write a program to loop over the new content and initialize the Multimedia objects (extract attributes). The example in 7.3 contains a sample program that does this for the ORDDicom object.