BLOBS MSSQL to MYSQL

knowj

I am currently working on an e-commerce project that will integrate with a Microsoft Navision MSSQL database.

The system is being build with PHP5/MySQL. The one part I am mainly unsure on is with the image transfer.

This is the process:
At the stock control server they will connect to the web server and update our database with all the new products/stock levels once a season using the data from their MSSQL database.
This is fairly simple but the part I am unsure of is with the images. 4 Images are going to be stored in BLOBS in the MSSQL database that are going to need to be transfered over to the web servers MySQL database.
Are MSSQL BLOBs encoded with the same format as MySQL blobs or will another method need to be used to store the images either Stock Control side or Web Server side such as base64_encode/base64_decode on a text field (if that will even work).

NogDog

I've never been a fan of storing images in databases, so I don't know if there are any "gotchas" I'm unaware of; but it seems to me that if the raw binary data was stored in the MSSQL BLOB and you do a query to retrieve it, you should just get the raw binary data back. You should then be able to store that data in a MySQL BLOB with no loss or alteration of that binary data. But like I said, I've never done this, so I might be missing something.

knowj

The images are only going to be stored for automation as the stock control company will load the images into their database which will then be transfered over to the website when all the new products are added.

Otherwise when the products database is transfered over someone will need to go through and add all the image for each product.

As soon as the database is transfered a cronjob or manually run script will run through the database and convert the blobs to files and create the sizes needed + add the dir/filename into the database (I still need to work out if image magik or the GD will do this better) I'm thinking of even clearing the blobs after this process to cut down on the DB size. It is going to be on a dedicated host so this doesn't really matter.

Well thats my idea for the method so far anyway.