Changes in This Release for Oracle Multimedia User's Guide

New Features

The Oracle Multimedia PL/SQL API is new in this release.

Oracle Multimedia now provides a simplified PL/SQL API with functions and procedures for managing image, audio, and video media data stored in BLOBs and BFILEs in Oracle Database. This API allows metadata extraction and image processing operations to be more intuitively included in SQL and PL/SQL applications.

The PL/SQL API enables developers to include many common operations in their applications. Examples include creating thumbnail images, cropping images, and converting images to Web-friendly formats, as well as extracting metadata. Using this API along with a comprehensive set of database tools and features, developers can consolidate multimedia data with other types of data in the database, for easy display in reports and Web user interfaces. These advantages enable rapid development and deployment of all database applications that include multimedia data.

See Oracle Multimedia Reference for more information about the Oracle Multimedia PL/SQL Packages.

Deprecated Features

The Oracle Multimedia support for the SQL/MM Still Image standard is deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release.

The following APIs are deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release:

• Oracle Multimedia Java API

• Oracle Multimedia Servlets and JSP Java API

• Oracle Multimedia DICOM Java API

• Oracle Multimedia Mid-Tier Java API

The Oracle Multimedia support for DICOM is deprecated in this release, and may be desupported in a future release.

The DICOM support in ORDImage objects that was introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2) was deprecated in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1), and may be desupported in a future release.