Database Plugins LLC, a company that specializes in the design, development and implementation of data-centric solutions for the Oracle market, has announced the availability of two new products. The Database Media-On-Demand Server provides specific support for the HTML5 video and audio tags as well as HTTP streaming of Flash videos. The Database Plugin Server and associated DBMPEG database plugin integrates the feature support of FFMpeg with the Oracle Database.
According to the company, the Database Media-On-Demand Server is a purpose-built, Oracle-enabled multimedia server intended to simplify the complexityof integrating multimedia capabilities with the Oracle Database. It provides a mechanism that integrates HTML5 and Flash videos with the Oracle Database. Web pages specify a URL that contains the location of a media resource. With the Database Media-On-Demand Server, this URL is an encoded reference to a PL/SQL function that returns the appropriate multimedia data-type. Programmers are able to freely associate multimedia data with structured data contained in the Oracle Database. This multimedia data is stored directly in the database which ensures full referential integrity. Support for Oracle SecureFiles also enables a "file-system" that is backed by the database. This provides support for applications that require a 'file-system' for the storage of multimedia data. The innovation on which the multimedia framework relies is the Database Plugin Server, a mechanism that brings user-extensibility to the logical framework of a database, allowing for the inclusion of complex logic directly in the database.
“The Oracle Database features the ability to natively understand multimedia formats. That means that the Oracle Database can digest a Flash video file or a WebM file or an MP4 file and know what codecs were involved, know the resolution rates, the bit rates, and so forth, but that multimedia support in Oracle is very incomplete in terms or the spectrum of different multimedia types out there,” Steve Guilford, president of Database Plugins, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “There is way more than just those three. There are specialized formats for gaming platforms and other devices, and what Database Plugins has come up with is a user extensibility framework for the Oracle Database that allows for third-party API libraries to be easily incorporated directly into the programming infrastructure of the database.” The result is that FFMpeg, which is “basically the ‘Swiss Army knife’ of multimedia libraries” can be incorporated in the PL/SQL, Guilford notes.
Oracle has a multimedia extension framework that allows programmers to add support for all other multimedia frameworks in addition to those that are natively supported by Oracle, says Guilford. “Given that FFMpeg supports everything out there, the ability to integrate FFMpeg directly into the database and then thereby integrate it into Oracle’s multimedia extension framework allows for the support of every multimedia format out there – audio, video and images.”
The products form a fundamental framework for a multimedia server architecture, says Guilford, making it is easy for programmers and companies to import their multimedia data and directly relate it with their relational data in the database, so that multimedia data is stored directly in the customer table, for example, with the customer’s row. In addition, the specialized server provides the advantage of enabling programmers to write familiar PL/SQL data access routines to extract the multimedia data from the database and stream it out to web browsers and mobile devices.
For more information, and to access a fully functional evaluation version of the software limited to 12 hours of continuous use, go to www.dbplugins.com.