Image, Audio, and Video Extenders Administration and Programming
The DB2 extenders exploit the object-oriented features of DB2. In
particular, with DB2 you can:
- Store LOBs of up to 2 gigabytes in a DB2 database.
- Define distinct data types for these large, complex objects. You
use these user-defined types (UDTs) to identify the type of data that is
represented by an object, for example, an image or an audio.
- Define specific functions that can be requested on a user-defined type of
data. For example, you can define a function to count the number of
colors in an image or to get the sampling rate of an audio. You request
these user-defined functions (UDFs) in an SQL statement in the same way as
other SQL functions.
The DB2 extenders create UDTs and UDFs for image, audio, video, and text
objects. The UDTs and UDFs can be important aids in helping you:
- Develop applications. Because the extenders define the data types
and functions, you do not have to define them in your applications.
- Ensure consistency. The same set of extender UDTs and UDFs are
available to all of your applications. This offers a ready-made level
of consistency that might otherwise be difficult to achieve across
applications that handle large objects.
- Create powerful queries. Because the UDFs are requested in the same
way as other SQL functions, your applications can include multi-data-type
queries. One SQL statement can access image, audio, video, and text
objects, together with traditional numeric and character data. You can
specify UDFs and UDTs in embedded SQL statements as well as in DB2 Call Level
Interface (DB2 CLI) calls.
And because the objects that the extenders process can be stored in a DB2
database, the same security, integrity, and recovery protections are in place
for those objects as for traditional data types stored in the database.
In addition, the DB2 extenders exploit the partitioned database environment
of DB2 Universal Database Enterprise- Extended Edition. Partitioning
allows applications to use a database that is too large for a single
computer. Partitioning also allows SQL operations to perform in
parallel, thereby speeding up SQL queries or utilities.
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