With text objects, you don't simply perform insert and update operations-you perform contextual operations, such as finding strings within other strings, occurrence counts, finding strings at given distances apart, and tracing synonyms. My company, for example, is Web-enabling a reasonably conventional tourism database. The database generates pages, which in turn generate context-sensitive hyperlinks. And the context is always changing because the database's contents can change dynamically. Clearly, the advent of rich data has brought with it some complications.
Images have a number of attributes, such as color, size, contrast, and storage format.
The online security system of one of our clients retrieves a photograph of authorized personnel from the database and pops it up every time the employee swipes his access card. Many research, nature conservation and wildlife protection organizations have systems that make extensive use of images, especially photographs. These systems perform complex operations such as containment, color matching, and similarity. For example, one of our clients uses pattern-matching algorithms to compare photographs to the dorsal fin profiles of great white sharks that are stored in a database. Another client stores and processes hours of telephone recordings for agents.