The DB2 extenders give your applications a lot of flexibility in searching for information. Your applications can search for objects that are associated with traditional types of data that are stored in a database. For example, they can search for an audio clip by its description or by the date it was recorded. Your applications can also search for objects by their inherent characteristics, such as the playing time of a video clip. The extenders automatically determine and store these characteristics for use in searches.
Your applications can even search for images by content. Imagine an application that uses visual examples to search for images. With such an application, users could select an example image and have the application find other images that have colors or textures similar to those in the example. With DB2 extenders' Query by Image Content (QBIC) capability, you can create applications that search for images in this visual way.