1 Introduction to Oracle Multimedia

Oracle Multimedia (formerly Oracle interMedia) enables Oracle Database to store, manage, and retrieve images, DICOM format medical images and other objects, audio, video, or other heterogeneous media data in an integrated fashion with other enterprise information.

Oracle Multimedia extends Oracle Database reliability, availability, and data management to multimedia content in traditional, medical, Internet, electronic commerce, and media-rich applications.

This chapter includes these sections:

Multimedia Object Types and Methods
Multimedia Storage

1.1 Multimedia Object Types and Methods

Oracle Multimedia provides the ORDAudio, ORDDoc, ORDImage, ORDVideo, and SI_StillImage object types and methods for:

Extracting metadata and attributes from multimedia data
Embedding metadata created by applications into image files
Getting and managing multimedia data from Oracle Multimedia, Web servers, file systems, and other servers
Performing manipulation operations on image data

Oracle Multimedia also provides the ORDDicom object type and methods for storing, managing, and manipulating DICOM format medical images and other data.

SQL Syntax for Complex Objects

The object syntax for accessing attributes within a complex object is the dot notation (except in Java):

variable.data_attribute

The syntax for invoking methods of a complex object is also the dot notation (except in Java):

variable.function(parameter1, parameter2, ...)

In keeping with recommended programming practices, a complete set of media attribute accessors (get methods) and setters (set methods) are provided for accessing attributes for each media type.

1.2 Multimedia Storage

Oracle Multimedia provides the ORDSource object type and methods for multimedia data source manipulation. The ORDAudio, ORDDoc, ORDImage, and ORDVideo object types all contain an attribute of type ORDSource.

Note:

Do not call ORDSource methods directly. Instead, invoke the wrapper method of the media object corresponding to the ORDSource method. ORDSource method information is presented only for users who want to write their own user-defined sources.

See Chapter 8 for more information about ORDSource methods.