The Blob challenge

Common task - loading files in to the database not so simple as you might think

When we thought about introducing this functionality we decided to use file system as data source or target.
So for example File system as data source provides following fields

[Directory]
[File Name]
[Size]
[Creation Date]
[Read Only]
[Hidden]
[Archive]
[File Data]

File system as data target uses just two fields

[File Name]
[File Data]

Next task actually loading files data into blob fields. We had to perform incredible amout of testing.
For example data can be loaded into Oracle Database in 4 ways

Via ODBC,
Via OLE DB,
Via Direct path loading
And Conventional path loading

Plus there are different versions of ODBS drivers and OLE DB Providers
And of course different versions of Oracle database.
And Various data types Raw, Long Raw, CLOB, NCLOB, Blob
and it has to be repeated for every database type our ETL software supports

Once file is loaded into blob field we export it back into different directory and compare files using MD5

Here is the package we used for testing