Large Objects (LOBs)
At some point in your application, you might find that you need to store
"large" data in your database. Large typically means "around 4kb or
more", although some databases can happily handle up to 32kb before data becomes
"large". Large objects can be either textual or binary in nature. PDO
allows you to work with this large data type by using the
PDO::PARAM_LOB
type code in your PDOStatement::bindParam() or
PDOStatement::bindColumn() calls.
PDO::PARAM_LOB tells
PDO to map the data as a stream, so that you can manipulate it using the
PHP Streams API.
Example #1 Displaying an image from a database
This example binds the LOB into the variable named $lob and then sends it to the browser using fpassthru(). Since the LOB is represented as a stream, functions such as fgets(), fread() and stream_get_contents() can be used on it.
<?php
$db = new PDO('odbc:SAMPLE', 'db2inst1', 'ibmdb2');
$stmt = $db->prepare("select contenttype, imagedata from images where id=?");
$stmt->execute(array($_GET['id']));
$stmt->bindColumn(1, $type, PDO::PARAM_STR, 256);
$stmt->bindColumn(2, $lob, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_BOUND);
header("Content-Type: $type");
fpassthru($lob);
?>
Example #2 Inserting an image into a database
This example opens up a file and passes the file handle to PDO to insert it as a LOB. PDO will do its best to get the contents of the file up to the database in the most efficient manner possible.
<?php
$db = new PDO('odbc:SAMPLE', 'db2inst1', 'ibmdb2');
$stmt = $db->prepare("insert into images (id, contenttype, imagedata) values (?, ?, ?)");
$id = get_new_id(); // some function to allocate a new ID
// assume that we are running as part of a file upload form
// You can find more information in the PHP documentation
$fp = fopen($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], 'rb');
$stmt->bindParam(1, $id);
$stmt->bindParam(2, $_FILES['file']['type']);
$stmt->bindParam(3, $fp, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$db->beginTransaction();
$stmt->execute();
$db->commit();
?>
Example #3 Inserting an image into a database: Oracle
Oracle requires a slightly different syntax for inserting a lob from a file. It's also essential that you perform the insert under a transaction, otherwise your newly inserted LOB will be committed with a zero-length as part of the implicit commit that happens when the query is executed:
<?php
$db = new PDO('oci:', 'scott', 'tiger');
$stmt = $db->prepare("insert into images (id, contenttype, imagedata) " .
"VALUES (?, ?, EMPTY_BLOB()) RETURNING imagedata INTO ?");
$id = get_new_id(); // some function to allocate a new ID
// assume that we are running as part of a file upload form
// You can find more information in the PHP documentation
$fp = fopen($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], 'rb');
$stmt->bindParam(1, $id);
$stmt->bindParam(2, $_FILES['file']['type']);
$stmt->bindParam(3, $fp, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$stmt->beginTransaction();
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->commit();
?>
Коментарии
I spend a lot of time trying to get this to work, but no matter what I did PDO corrupted my data.
I finally discovered that I had been using:
$pdo->exec('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');
in the TRY part of my connection script.
This off course doesn't work when you feed binary input to PDO using the parameter lob.
PDOStatement's methods bindParam and bindValue also work with strings, as in:
<?php
$data = file_get_contents($filename);
$stmt->bindValue(1, $data, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
//...
?>
This was the only way I could make it work with PostgreSQL.
A big gotcha exists for Oracle users.
You have to save CLOB objects using PDO::PARAM_STR, not PDO::PARAM_LOB.
But you MUST send the 4th argument, usually strlen($subject) or you get a LONG error.
There seems to be a bug that affects example 1 above. PDO::PARAM_LOB when used with pdo::bindColumn() is supposed to return a stream but it returns a string. Passing this string to fpassthru() then triggers an error with the message 'supplied argument is not a valid stream resource'. This has been reported in bug #40913. The work around is to do the following:
<?php
$stmt = $db->prepare("select contenttype, imagedata from images where id=?");
$stmt->execute(array($_GET['id']));
$stmt->bindColumn(1, $type, PDO::PARAM_STR, 256);
$stmt->bindColumn(2, $lob, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_BOUND);
header("Content-Type: $type");
echo($lob);
?>
Since the browser is expecting an image after the call to header() writing the string representation of the binary output with echo() has the same affect as calling fpassthru().
For selecting data out of Postgres, the data type of the column in the table determined if the parameter bound with PARAM_LOB returned a string or returned a resource.
<?php
// create table log ( data text ) ;
$geth = $dbh->prepare('select data from log ');
$geth->execute();
$geth->bindColumn(1, $dataString, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$geth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_BOUND);
echo ($dataString); // $dataString is a string
// create table log ( data bytea ) ;
$geth = $dbh->prepare('select data from log');
$geth->execute();
$geth->bindColumn(1, $dataFH, PDO::PARAM_LOB);
$geth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_BOUND);
fpassthru($dataFH); // $dataFH is a resource
The DBMSs that are listed above have these (default) limits on the maximum size of a char string. The maximum is given in bytes so the number of characters storable can be smaller if a multibyte encoding is used.
CUBRID: 16kB
SQL Server: 2GB
Firebird: 32kB
IBM Db2: 32kB
Informix: 32kB
MySQL: 16kB
Oracle: 2kB
PostgreSQL: 1GB
SQLite: 1 billion bytes
4D: Unknown, but LOBs are limited to 2GB.