Hi, Chris -

First, I think it's the experience of most people in this group that we don't
put the actual BLOBs into the database simply because of the speed of getting
them back which will be WAY slow. It's not anything particular about MySQL that causes us to do this. Even the
so-called universal databases (read the two "biggies") have the same problem.
The only database product I've seen that does this anywhere near fast is the Jasmine multimedia database product
from CA (US vendor) and Fujitsu (rest of the world vendor).

Second, nearly always, we're displaying the results of the retrieval inside some
application. If you're running off the command line, you need to get back out
of the MySQL environment to display the picture. I don't know whether the \. escape sequence would do that
or not. (This escape sequence is documented in the manual.)

With MySQL, what most of us do is put the file location, either in the native
file system or a URL, into the database. Then we retrieve the file location,
feed that into our application at the appropriate spot, and let the application do the work.

For example, I have a WAY old 16-bit application called WinJPEG that's very fast
loading (on account of it was probably written in something like C, not a
fancy-dancy language with a lot of GUI overhead) and to which, if I fire off a "DOS" command, I can use the file
location as an argument. It's also possible to feed the BLOB's location to a
browser. Obviously there are other ways, including complete front-end applications, that could be used to display the
BLOB.

HTH.

virginia