Guidelines to Understand and work with the OLE Datatype. (1 Viewer)

prabha_friend

Prabhakaran Karuppaih
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"The Datatype from Hell"
Hello All!
First I want to confess that I am not a professional Access DBA or a VBA Developer. I am just a curious amateur who wants to spend his time someway useful. Currently I am exploring the OLE Datatype in an access environment. I wonder why this Datatype is much complex to understand. My exploration was very smooth until I approached programmatically. First, I cannot able to store OLE data like any other data in a normal access recordset (DAO). Secondly, I fear If I am having this much difficulty in dealing with this Datatype in a single application (Access) how am I goanna automate cross applications (Access and Excel). I did some search in internet regarding this. What I found so far is not fruitful either. To say frankly, those are too much advanced to a beginner like me. I swear I never found an article which starts from the origin like what is OLE Datatype? In what ways it differ from other datatypes? Why we are not getting it stored in a Recordset? If possible how it is taking cared in DAO and ADO models? I believe you understand the need of all amateurs like me to evolve and I expect you all people here will do the needful.
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Before a month, I asked same kind of help for MSDE. I cannot forget the supports our members gave me here. Now situation is so much improved in MSDE for me. I am also deciding to write an article about MSDE sooner. If I do, definitely It will be a dedication to you all.
 

Simon_MT

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My undestanding is that an OLE up to Access 2003 is really a bitmap, hence they are called Objects as Large as Elephants or bloatware.

Simon
 

HiTechCoach

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My undestanding is that an OLE up to Access 2003 is really a bitmap, hence they are called Objects as Large as Elephants or bloatware.

Simon

OLE object as not bitmaps, but BLOBS (Binary Large OBjects) that also contains a large wrapper for data the application. It is this wrapper that causes all the database bloat.
 

Simon_MT

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Hi-Tech Coach,

Thanks for the explanation, I always thought that the bloating was caused due to the first page of a document being held as a bitmap image so that if renders quickly something a pre-fetch in flash. With images I thought they were stored as an uncompressed bitmap whilst a jpeg can compress an image by its ability to amalgamate blocks of pixels rather than a bitmap storing values for each and every pixel.

Simon
 

HiTechCoach

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With images I thought they were stored as an uncompressed bitmap whilst a jpeg can compress an image by its ability to amalgamate blocks of pixels rather than a bitmap storing values for each and every pixel.
Simon
That may be true for the different file formats, but Access does not care.

Storing a file as a OLE object (BLOB) doe not change the format in any way.
 

HiTechCoach

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Local time
Today, 09:05
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"The Datatype from Hell"
Hello All!
First I want to confess that I am not a professional Access DBA or a VBA Developer. I am just a curious amateur who wants to spend his time someway useful. Currently I am exploring the OLE Datatype in an access environment. I wonder why this Datatype is much complex to understand. My exploration was very smooth until I approached programmatically. First, I cannot able to store OLE data like any other data in a normal access recordset (DAO). Secondly, I fear If I am having this much difficulty in dealing with this Datatype in a single application (Access) how am I goanna automate cross applications (Access and Excel). I did some search in internet regarding this. What I found so far is not fruitful either. To say frankly, those are too much advanced to a beginner like me. I swear I never found an article which starts from the origin like what is OLE Datatype? In what ways it differ from other datatypes? Why we are not getting it stored in a Recordset? If possible how it is taking cared in DAO and ADO models? I believe you understand the need of all amateurs like me to evolve and I expect you all people here will do the needful.
P.S:
Before a month, I asked same kind of help for MSDE. I cannot forget the supports our members gave me here. Now situation is so much improved in MSDE for me. I am also deciding to write an article about MSDE sooner. If I do, definitely It will be a dedication to you all.

I normally do not include OLE/blob data in normally recordset with other data.

I have found very advanced uses for them. It is not for user data. But for system stuff. I use the OLE data type, but not as an OLE container. I used is as just a BLOB containers. This eliminates all the bloat by not including all the OLE data getting added. I use BLOBs for the automatic deploying of fonts, DLLs, image files, etc.
 

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