Want to store and retrived images in the BFILE format using inter media

Question

I want to store and retrived images in the BFILE format using inter media.I found a article in the oracle site that Oracle interMedia image supports BFILEs.But this article is not demonstrating the use of BFILEs.Please help me to findout the solution.
Thanks in advance.
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Answer 1

The advantage to using BFILE storage for your is that it's an easy way for Oracle
Multimedia to access your images without importing them into the database.
The disadvantages are that the images are read-only. If you want to scale an image or
convert to a different format, you will need to create a destination image to hold the result. This
will necessarily be a BLOB based image.
Adding images is difficult to do from within an application program. Generally you would add new images to a file system that is accessible to the Oracle Database, then insert new rows in your table with appropriate BFILE pointers to the new images.
BFILE images require separate backup from the database. Also there is not way to transactionally coordinate your BFILE data with your relational data.
If you are using Oracle 11g, you can use the SecureFile option for BLOB storage. This is much faster then the previous BLOB storage (now called BasicFile) and much faster then BFILE also.
That said, below is a code snippet that shows how to insert a BFILE based image, set it's properties, show it's properties and select the BFILE locator to access the content. You would need to use the DBMS_LOB package (in PL/SQL) to read the content. From other APIs, (e.g., Java) you would need to use the proper interfaces to access the BFILE.
Note that you need change the USER, PASSWORD fields in the code. Also you should change the directory location and image name for your use.
-- create a directory object indicating where the images are stored;
create or replace directory imgdir as '/tmp';
-- and grant permission to read to a user;
grant read on directory imgdir to <USER>;
conn <USER>/<PASSWORD>;
-- create the images table
create table images(id integer primary key, image ordsys.ordimage);
set serveroutput on
declare
obj ordsys.ordimage;
begin
-- use the init('FILE', <SRC_LOCATION>, <SRC_FILE>) function
-- to create an ORDIMAGE object with a BFILE source
insert into images(id, image)
values(1, ordimage.init('FILE', 'IMGDIR', 'wizard.jpg'))
returning image into obj;
-- lets see if the image source is local or not
if(obj.isLocal()) then
dbms_output.put_line('image source is local');
else
dbms_output.put_line('image source is NOT local');
end if;
-- set the properties of the image object
obj.setProperties();
-- and update the row
update images set image=obj where id=1;
commit;
end;
column height format 99999
column width format 99999
column mimetype format a30
column length format 999999
-- let's see what we have
select t.image.getHeight() as "height"
, t.image.getWidth() as "width"
, t.image.getMimetype() as "mimetype"
, t.image.getContentLength() as "length"
from images t
-- fetch a BFILE handle to the content
declare
bf BFILE;
length number;
begin
select t.image.getBfile() into bf
from images t
where t.id=1;
-- use the DBMS_LOB interface to find out size of image
length := dbms_lob.getLength(bf);
dbms_output.put_line('length of BFILE is ' || length);
end;
---What we get when we run the code
Connected.
Directory created.
Connected.
Table created.
image source is NOT local
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
height     width mimetype               length
399     485 image/jpeg          92552
length of BFILE is 92552
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
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