How to dump all of our images from a VARBINARY(MAX) field in SQL Server 2008 to the filesystem?
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03-07-2019 - |
Question
I have a table which has an IDENTITY
field and a VARBINARY(MAX)
field in it. Is there any way I could dump the content of each VARBINARY(MAX)
field to the filesystem (eg. c:\temp\images
)?
Table schema:
PhotoId INTEGER NOT NULL IDENTITY
Image VARBINARY(MAX) NOT NULL
DateCreated SMALLDATETIME
Output:
c:\temp\images\1.png
c:\temp\images\2.png
c:\temp\images\3.png
... etc...
What is the best way to approach this?
Solution
I've figured it out thanks to this post ...
SET NOCOUNT ON
DECLARE @IdThumbnail INTEGER,
@MimeType VARCHAR(100),
@FileName VARCHAR(200),
@Sqlstmt varchar(4000)
DECLARE Cursor_Image CURSOR FOR
SELECT a.IdThumbnail
FROM tblThumbnail a
ORDER BY a.IdThumbnail
OPEN Cursor_Image
FETCH NEXT FROM Cursor_Image INTO @IdThumbnail
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
-- Generate the file name based upon the ID and the MIMETYPE.
SELECT @FileName = LTRIM(STR(@IdThumbnail)) + '.png'
-- Framing DynamicSQL for XP_CMDshell
SET @Sqlstmt='BCP "SELECT OriginalImage
FROM Appian.dbo.tblThumbnail
WHERE IdThumbnail = ' + LTRIM(STR(@IdThumbnail)) +
'" QUERYOUT c:\Temp\Images\' + LTRIM(@FileName) +
' -T -fC:\Temp\ImageFormatFile.txt'
print @FileName
print @sqlstmt
EXEC xp_cmdshell @sqlstmt
FETCH NEXT FROM Cursor_Image INTO @IdThumbnail
END
CLOSE Cursor_Image
DEALLOCATE Cursor_Image
Please note -> u need to have a format file, for the BCP command. This is the content of the file and i've placed it in c:\Temp (as noted in the BCP commandline above).
10.0
1
1 SQLIMAGE 0 0 "" 1 OriginalImage ""
Final note about that format file .. there HAS TO BE A NEW LINE AFTER THE LAST LINE. otherwise u'll get an error.
Enjoy!
OTHER TIPS
The easiest (for me) would be to write a little .NET application that dumped the varbinary fields to a file.
If you are opposed to working in .NET, then you should (I've not tested this) be able to create a new column of type "VARBINARY(MAX) FILESTREAM". Be sure you also have a the corresponding "ROWGUIDCOL" column. Then you can (in theory) do something like:
UPDATE table SET varfilestream_col = varbinary_col
Hope that works for ya.