Easy Way to Extract BLOB data to file

[Aik Khoon]

Hi,

Currently, I'm trying to extract BLOB data to file (Oracle 8.0.5 NT
platform) e.g. MS Word document. I did some research, including finding out
from this newgroup where someone
suggested calling an external procedure OutputString to dump BLOB data out.
I tried this
out but always find it troublesome since I have many tables with BLOB
columns and
everytime I have to expliclitly create new procedures just to pump the BLOB
data out
for that particular column.

Question :
1. Will Oracle come up with some builtin packages I can just call to extract
data. I come
from Informix background and they have this handy way of extracting BLOB
data e.g.

SELECT LOTOFILE(col_name, 'YourPathTofile!', 'SERVER') from some_table
where ....

and the data is extracted. Data Insertion is also straight forward :

INSERT INTO some_table VALUES (1, FILETOBLOB('YourPathToFile','SERVER')
...

2. Why does Oracle only provide a package procedure to load BLOB data e.g.
DBMS_LOB.
LOADFROMFILE but none for extracting data ?

This is especially important for MSWord BLOB data (r.t. graphics data
for Web use).

I hope there is some extra support for BLOB data manipulation in Oracle
8.0.5 though I
saw improvement in 8.1.5 but I can't be using it.

regards,
Aik Khoon

[Remy O'Keefe]

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--
Remy O'Keefe
888.882.6669 ext. 189 toll free or 425.519.6692
RO'Ke...@SolutionsIQ.com
SolutionsIQ, Software Products Division
http://www.solutionsiq.com/products/index.html

Aik Khoon <wrote in message news:7pc7qm$6e5...