Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Retrieving Large Data with ADO.NET (BLOB)

For couple of days, I was working on an issue occurring while I`m trying to download files from Sharepoint 2003 document library. The problem was some of the files were too big (more than 256mb) so when I try to open binary visual studio was giving SystemOutOfMemory Exception. Later I understood that it was hitting the limit of the byte[]. So I thought there should be a way of streaming big files, I searched on internet for 5 hours and when most of my fate lost, my colligue found out about BLOB`s. Then we found the following article that explains how to stream a big binary file from SQL database.

MSDN Article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/87z0hy49.aspx

C# Version: (In case link breaks)

// Assumes that connection is a valid SqlConnection object.
SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand(
"SELECT pub_id, logo FROM pub_info", connection);

// Writes the BLOB to a file (*.bmp).
FileStream stream;
// Streams the BLOB to the FileStream object.
BinaryWriter writer;

// Size of the BLOB buffer.
int bufferSize = 100;
// The BLOB byte[] buffer to be filled by GetBytes.
byte[] outByte = new byte[bufferSize];
// The bytes returned from GetBytes.
long retval;
// The starting position in the BLOB output.
long startIndex = 0;

// The publisher id to use in the file name.
string pubID = "";

// Open the connection and read data into the DataReader.
connection.Open();
SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.SequentialAccess);

while (reader.Read())
{
// Get the publisher id, which must occur before getting the logo.
pubID = reader.GetString(0);

// Create a file to hold the output.
stream = new FileStream(
"logo" + pubID + ".bmp", FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
writer = new BinaryWriter(stream);

// Reset the starting byte for the new BLOB.
startIndex = 0;

// Read bytes into outByte[] and retain the number of bytes returned.
retval = reader.GetBytes(1, startIndex, outByte, 0, bufferSize);

// Continue while there are bytes beyond the size of the buffer.
while (retval == bufferSize)
{
writer.Write(outByte);
writer.Flush();

// Reposition start index to end of last buffer and fill buffer.
startIndex += bufferSize;
retval = reader.GetBytes(1, startIndex, outByte, 0, bufferSize);
}

// Write the remaining buffer.
writer.Write(outByte, 0, (int)retval - 1);
writer.Flush();

// Close the output file.
writer.Close();
stream.Close();
}

// Close the reader and the connection.
reader.Close();
connection.Close();

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