Loading an Image to the Database

Question

Hello
I have a requirement to load 1000's of images to a database.
In the pass we have successfully loaded images from a screen using
select blob_content, id into image, apex_id from apex_application_files where name = :P120_LOAD for update;
I now tried to use apex_application_file to do the same in a background PL/SQL procedure
COMPANY_ID_FILE:= 'E:\' || COMAPANY_ID || '.jpg';
select blob_content, id into image, apex_id from apex_application_files where name = COMPANY_ID_FILE for update;
This does not seam to work!?
I believe apex_application_files is not the right function to used in this case
Any comments or recommendation very welcome
Thanks
Pete

Answer 1

Hello
I pleased to report it is all working now.
My thanks to the people above, Harm ten Hapel from Oracle support and the link below
http://www.psoug.org/reference/dbms_lob.html
This is what I did:
Created a directory within Oracle which linked the directory on the Oracle server. It does not create a directory on the server. This need to done manually.
create directory data as 'c:\data';
To show that you created the directory correctly
select directory_path from all_directories;
To delete a directory
drop directory data;
The code I used is
begin
TEMP:= data ||'.jpg'; -- file name on the server
dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob,true); -- initialise the Blob field
l_bfile := BFILENAME('HOTEL',TEMP); -- Assigns file
DBMS_LOB.fileopen (l_bfile, DBMS_LOB.file_readonly); -- open file
lgh_file := dbms_lob.getlength(l_bfile); -- collects file length
dbms_lob.loadfromfile(l_blob, l_bfile, lgh_file); -- reads file
DBMS_LOB.fileclose (l_bfile); -- closes file
--- Extracts the information about the blob data
DBMS_LOB.CREATETEMPORARY(attributes, TRUE, DBMS_LOB.CALL);
ORDSYS.ORDImage.getProperties(l_blob,
attributes,
img_mimeType,
img_width,
img_height,
fileFormat,
compressionFormat,
contentFormat,
img_contentLength);
image:= l_blob;
RECORD_FOUND:= 0;
--- This is important as the system will only let you open a small number of file at open. If the file open fails it still counts as an open file and find the load programming failing with too many file open error
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN -- catches all 'no data found' errors
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('DATA_FOUND - file = ' || TEMP);
DBMS_LOB.fileclose (l_bfile);
record_found:= 1;
end;
I hope it is of help
Thanks to all
Pete