In Oracle, the following are utilities or programming environments available for loading digital objects into the database:
SQL*Loader
PL/SQL calling Oracle Multimedia
PL/SQL calling
dbms_lob
packageJava
Oracle Spatial
XML DB
External language (some examples include C and PHP)
Oracle Database File System
External application (Photoshop, Word, which uses an API call to save straight to the database)
Though these methods are heavily programmatic, they rely on the notion that the digital objects already exist in the file system. There are potentially other locations, which could be considered as sources for loading into the database:
FTP (and sFTP)
E-mail (as attachments or embedded in the e-mail)
Other databases
Websites (HTTP)
Web services (Multipart MIME)
Embedded in Powerpoint or documents
The digital objects might come in a variety of formats, which require processing before they can be loaded into the database. Some include:
ZIP (Gzip)
RAR
TAR
Encrypted