New Features

The following feature is new in this release:

• Oracle Multimedia PL/SQL API

  Oracle Multimedia now provides a simplified API for managing image, audio, video, and other heterogeneous media data stored in BLOBs and BFILEs in Oracle Database. This API allows metadata extraction and image processing operations to be more intuitively included in SQL and PL/SQL applications.

  The PL/SQL API enables developers to include several common operations in their applications. Examples include creating thumbnail images, cropping images, and converting images to Web-friendly formats, as well as extracting metadata. Using this API along with a comprehensive set of database tools and features, developers can consolidate multimedia data with other types of data in the database, for easy display in reports and Web user interfaces. These advantages enable rapid development and deployment of all database applications that include multimedia data.

  See About Multimedia PL/SQL Packages for more information about the new Oracle Multimedia PL/SQL API.

Deprecated Features

The following features are deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release:

• The Oracle Multimedia Java API and the Oracle Multimedia Servlets and JSP Java API

  As an alternative for these APIs, developers can embed PL/SQL anonymous blocks in their Java code.

• Oracle Multimedia support for the SQL/MM Still Image standard

  As an alternative for image processing operations, Oracle Multimedia developers can call the new ORD_IMAGE PL/SQL package. Or, they can use the ORDImage methods.

  As an alternative for image matching, Oracle Database developers can use open source packages, such as OpenCV.

The following feature was deprecated in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1), and may be desupported in a future release:

• The Oracle Multimedia DICOM support in ORDImage objects that was introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2)