What is the difference between sql block and image types

Question

This question was actually posed to me this morning by one of my compilers, and it completely abandoned me, because I didn’t even understand that SQL has the “image” data type, so I always just went down the file / image compression path, and so on. .d. into the blob fields.

After a (very) quick look around msdn, I could really find information that the datatype type of the pages image works like blob or varbinary (max) to a size of [max] ~ 2 GB, but in the past it might not seem too big.

I am wondering if it is possible that a figurative data type is a way of providing indexed / search metadata on images in SQL ...?

Can anyone suggest anything through links or explanations regarding this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, so thanks for any answers!

UPDATE / Possible Answer

After digging a little more, I may have made some progress with this ...

It is entirely possible that my initial thoughts on what is related to the type of “image” may have been somewhat erroneous, perhaps due to the fact that the type called “image” (which I apparently found quite introductory to fallacy at first glance), which I thought was related to the mimetype image, but which, it seems, points more to an idea like “disk-image” or “binary image”.

Thus, it seems that the IMAGE type was introduced in SQL before the varbinary type was resolved as a (maximum) field, perhaps as a way to store files in SQL as it is now taken for granted (at least by itself ) using VARBINARY (MAX) ...

For reference (both are quite old, but seem to fit the bill):

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/138883-Storing-Retrieving-images-from-SQL-Server-2005

http://www.basenow.com/help/Data_types_in_Microsoft_SQL_Server.asp

If anyone can offer any constructive crit for this possible answer that would be really helpful in trying to figure this out ...

Welcome all!

Answer 1

It depends on the vendor, but usually:

A blob/image data type is a column type that stores binary data in a database separate from the rest of the columns. Therefore, every time you request image / blob data, the database looks at the location and reads the data and sends it back to you.

Some manufacturers have a TEXT data type, which is the same as the difference that it accepts text data, so you can overlay full-text indexes on them.

Answer 2

As you refer to Microsoft SQL Server, it is important to remember that when choosing between IMAGE and VARBINARY data types, Microsoft ignores the IMAGE type, so the fact that you did not use it is very good in your case.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx