There are a lot of different types of unstructured data in the market place. On top of this and as has been discussed in previous chapters, there is a huge variety of multimedia types. Oracle does not support all of these, so when it comes to processing them, which might involve transforming, extracting, or converting, the solution is to build a program that runs in the database in PL/SQL or Java. This program when run will invoke an external process to perform digital object processing and retrieve the results back into the database.
The processing could be done before the data is loaded into the database. Based on business requirements though, it might be more efficient or a business necessity to perform this after the data has been loaded into the database.
The following are examples of uses of shelling out of the database:
