LOBs Case Studies, 3 of 3

Building a LOB-Based Web Site: First Steps

Problem

Design and Build a LOB and interMedia Based Web Site. The web site must include video 'thumbnails' where by users can click on a specific thumbnail to see a short 6 - 8 second video clip.

First Steps Solution

Here are some ideas for setting up your LOB-based web-site:

Install Oracle9i (including interMedia) on your database server.
Install a web server, such as, Oracle9i Appplication Server, IIS, Netscape Web server, or Apache.
Install the interMedia Web Agent on your web server
Install the interMedia ClipBoard on your client (PC)

On your server, create a table with at least three columns,such as:

create table video_clips ( 
move_id integer, 
thumbnail ordsys.ordimage, 
movie ordsys.ordvideo);

See Note 2.

Collect/Capture your media content (images, movies)
If you're using a digital camera or scanner interMedia ClipBoard will help you with this
Use interMedia ClipBoard to upload your media content into the database, into the table you created in step 5.
Use a HTML authoring tool, such as DreamWeaver, FrontPage, ... in conjunction with interMedia ClipBoard to build your web pages.
Add the thumbnails with the help of interMedia ClipBoard, with a caption. Make the thumbnails have hyperlinks to the movie clips. It is recommended to not use a separate streaming server at this point. One way to do this is to encode the movies as Apple QuickTime files, for example, if you do this correctly they'll start playing as they download... This is not quite the same as "streaming". If you have reasonable bandwidth, this should be more than sufficient.

DO you need plug-ins? How about Space requirements? Assume you have about 100 movie clips and they all take a total of about 30+ minutes. You should not need any plugins, that is no Real Networks plugins.

Your disk space depends on the frame size, frame rate, and compression settings. One second of video, at 720x480 pixels, 30 frames per second (fps), takes roughly 3.6MB of disk space. 720x480 is pretty big for the web but should be fine if this is on an intranet. 30 fps looks very smooth but might not be necessary. Test a sample to see what 320x240 looks like. Check if there is sufficient detail present. If not, increase the resolution until you are satisfied.

Note 1:

This isn't likely to be trivial to set up. Just getting everything installed and configured could be challenging. Enroll the help of Oracle DBAs and consultants
If you can, specify a DB_BLOCKS_SIZE of 8K and as many DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS as you can.

Note 2:

The foregoing example is a simplistic create table example. You typically need LOB storage clauses for LOBs inside ORDImage and ORDVideo. You also need a separate tablespace for these LOBs, CHUNK 32768, NOCACHE on the VIDEO LOB, CACHE on the IMAGE LOB.

See Also: