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Oracle® Multimedia User's Guide
11g Release 1 (11.1)

Part Number B28415-01
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What's New

This document summarizes the changes to this guide since the previous release as well as the new features introduced in the current release.

Changes Since Release 10.2

The following changes have been made to this guide since Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2):

New Features for Release 11.1

Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1) includes several new features for Oracle Multimedia DICOM and improvements in the area of performance and scalability.

Oracle Multimedia DICOM

Oracle Multimedia DICOM was introduced in release 10.2. Release 11.1 adds the following Oracle Multimedia DICOM features:

See Oracle Multimedia DICOM Developer's Guide and Oracle Multimedia DICOM Java API Reference for information about these features.

Oracle Multimedia Performance and Scalability

Release 11.1 also includes performance and scalability improvements. This release provides improvements for applications that require increased throughput in certain image processing operations as well as the ability to manage very large media objects.

In this release, the size limit of media data that can be stored and retrieved within database storage structures (BLOB) in an Oracle Multimedia object type in the database is extended to the BLOB size limit, which is between 8 terabytes (TB) and 128 terabytes depending on the block size.

In addition to storing and retrieving large images, Oracle Multimedia can also extract image attributes including height, width, and compressionFormat for images that contain up to two billion pixels, or with a resolution of up to 46000x46000. For images that support metadata extraction (IPTC, EXIF and XMP), Oracle Multimedia can extract and manage embedded metadata for any size image that it can store.

Oracle Multimedia provides image processing functions that change image content. For example, you can scale and crop an image or convert it to a different file format. Processing an image requires interpreting the pixel values of the image, an operation that often impacts system performance and memory. As a result, Oracle Multimedia may be unable to successfully process images that it can successfully store. The maximum image size that Oracle Multimedia can process depends on the image format and the system platform. See the Oracle Multimedia README.txt file for guidelines on image processing limits for each supported format.

Performance and scalability improvements have been made for the most popular image processing operation, generating a thumbnail image. Significant performance improvements have been made for generating these images from TIFF and JPEG sources, as well as from DICOM sources with JPEG encoding. In addition, improvements in scale-down operations enable the fast generation of thumbnail images from very large source images (JPEG, TIFF, and DICOM with JPEG or RAW encoding.)

In this release, Oracle Multimedia also supports the next generation of LOBs, which is called Oracle SecureFiles. SecureFiles introduces a completely reengineered large object (LOB) to dramatically improve performance and significantly strengthen the native content management capabilities of Oracle Database. Oracle Multimedia object types, methods, and packages have been tested to ensure correct operation with SecureFiles. Oracle recommends using SecureFiles to store media content within Oracle Multimedia object types to reap the performance benefits of this new BLOB implementation.