LOBS Enable interMEDIA

While LOBs provide the infrastructure within the database to store multimedia data, Oracle8i also provides developers with additional functionality for the most commonly used multimedia types. The multimedia types include text, image, locator and audio or video data.

Oracle8i introduces the interMedia bundle, a collection of specialized data types also called data cartridges. Text data, spatial location, images, audio and video data are all supported. Users can access objects of the type using efficient SQL queries, manipulate its contents (trim an image), read and write its contents, and convert data from one format to another.

Data cartridges in turn use Oracle8i's infrastructure to define the object types, methods, and LOBs necessary to represent these specialized types of data in the database.

Oracle8i's data cartridges provide a predefined set of objects and operations. This facilitates application development with these types.

See also http://www.oracle.com/intermedia