Tag Archives: SQL Image Viewer

Connecting to a Microsoft Access (.accdb) database

If you have problems connecting to a Microsoft Access database with the .accdb extension (using SQL Image Viewer, SQL Blob Export or Access OLE Export) and see this error:

there are a few possibilities this error is being raised.

You can connect to that database using Access on the same machine

If you have Access installed on the machine and can connect to the .accdb file without problems, then it’s possible that you are using Microsoft Office 365.

Microsoft Office 365 runs in a self-contained virtual environment, and 3rd party products do not have access to the necessary library files to connect to the .accdb file.  In this situation, you will need to install the Microsoft Access runtime files.  You have the following options:

There is, however, one caveat. You cannot install Office 365 and the above Redistributable/Runtime files of the same major version together. You will have to install the Redistributable/Runtime files of a lower version than your current Office 365 version. For example, if you have Office 365 in version 2016 installed, you will have to install the ‘Microsoft Access 2013 Runtime’ or ‘Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable’ and not ‘Microsoft Access 2016 Runtime’.

Another possibility is that you already have the Redistributable/Runtime files installed, but you are currently using the wrong version of SQL Image Viewer/SQL Blob Export/Access OLE Export.  All 3 products come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and are installed automatically on your computer.  If you only have the 32-bit Redistributable/Runtime files installed on your machine, you will need to use the 32-bit versions of our products; likewise if you have the 64-bit Redistributable/Runtime files installed.

You have never connected to the Access database on the same machine

To connect to the .accdb file, you will need to install the Microsoft Access Runtime/Redistributable files first.  You have the following options:

Usually, you can just download and install the latest version (Microsoft Access 2016 Runtime) to connect to your database successfully.


Merge multiple blobs into a single file


ID  fileID  sequence  blobdata
1     201       1              (60 Kb)
2     201       2              (60 Kb)
3     201       3              (60 Kb)
4     201       4              (20 Kb)






SELECT fileID, blobdata FROM mytable ORDER BY sequence



  • select the append to file option for existing files

Running the SQL Image Viewer command line interface in batch files


So say the executable files are located in this folder:





SQL Image Viewer 9.1 and PDF files





Why is SQL Image Viewer not displaying details of my blobs








Select the column containing the unidentified blob data.




SQL Image Viewer 9 and custom layouts



or in this layout for sales staff:




Take a look at the videos describing custom layouts in detail:

  • how to create custom layouts
  • how to display multi-frame images
  • how to easily verify data from scanned images using custom layouts



Exporting base64 encoded values in your databases

We recently had a prospect that had issues exporting her data using SQL Image Viewer.  She kindly sent a sample of the data, and it turned out that it was a base64 encoded string stored in a memo field.

So we got to work and now, SQL Image Viewer can decode base64 encoded data stored in memo fields.  It will recognize most image and binary file types.  For example, this is the result returned by Management Studio for a query that retrieves a base64 encoded PDF file:


This is the result returned by the same query in SQL Image Viewer:


You can immediately identify the type of data that’s stored in your database.  When you want to export the file, ensure that you select the memo field:


and also the Extract base64 encoded values in memo fields option:


For now, SQL Image Viewer will not inspect binary blob fields for base64 encoded data, as it wouldn’t make sense to store text values in a binary fields.  However, if you do find yourself in such a situation, do drop us a line at support@yohz.com.

Download a trial of SQL Image Viewer now, or buy a license from only USD 45.

Extracting files and data from OLE Object fields

OLE Object fields are commonly used by applications using Access as the back-end database to store files and common document formats.  It is convenient because Windows handles how the files or documents are opened, modified, and saved via OLE servers.  However, it is difficult to extract the data from those fields because of the additional OLE information embedded together with your data.

For example, let’s create a table in Access, and store a simple Excel workbook, first as an embedded object, and second as an embedded file.  Our table structure is as follows:

We create the first record by directly embedding an Excel workbook.

For the second record, we simply attach an existing Excel workbook.

In Access, we can open both workbooks easily simply by double-clicking on them.  This is the OLE servers at work.

Now if we take a look at the size of the 2 records using SQL Blob Viewer, we can see that the size of the embedded workbook is larger than the attached file.  The size of the attached file record is also larger than the original file size, because Access needs to add additional data to the file.

If you try to export the data as is, you will not be able to open the exported files, because the format itself is not Excel-compliant.  Both records in the OLE Object fields have had additional OLE wrappers added to them.

The usual way to extract the content is to open each item individually in Excel, and save them to files.  This is a tedious process if you have a lot of records you need to extract.

We have 2 products, SQL Image Viewer and Access OLE Export, that can remove the OLE wrappers for data stored in OLE Object fields, and export them to disk.

SQL Image Viewer is for technical users who are comfortable writing SQL queries to retrieve the required data.

Access OLE Export is for less technically inclined users who just want to be able to select a table and export their data quickly.

Both products can identify embedded Office document content, images, PDF content, Open Document content, and other common binary types.  Both products can also extract data from OLE Object fields used in other database engines like SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite, and ODBC data sources.

There may be situations where both products are unable to identify embedded content correctly.  This may be because the registered OLE Server for that content type is not yet supported.  For e.g. PDF files can have different OLE servers like Adobe Acrobat, Foxit PDF Reader. Nitro, etc.  In these cases, send us (at support@yohz.com) a sample of the embedded data, and we will add support for that OLE server type.

Download a FREE 14-day trial of SQL Image Viewer or Access OLE Export now, and see how easy it is to export your ‘trapped’ OLE Object data.

SQL Blob Viewer and SQL Image Viewer

So we have 2 very similar products, SQL Blob Viewer and SQL Image Viewer, and here’s why.

SQL Image Viewer was released 9 years ago, and over the years, it has accumulated a lot of code that is user-specific.  When we made the decision to create a 64-bit version of SQL Image Viewer, we discovered that it would be pointless to port those user-specific functions over too.  We did not want to leave our existing customers with a new version that did not have those functions, so we renamed the new product SQL Blob Viewer.

SQL Blob Viewer has almost the same feature set as SQL Image Viewer.  The most obvious difference is how it displays images – it does this by displaying the images together with the textual data –

while SQL Image Viewer displays images separate from the textual data (we’re still gathering feedback on whether users prefer the SQL Image Viewer way of displaying images).

SQL Blob Viewer can also embed images in exported Excel spreadsheets, has a user-friendlier interface to configure incremental exports, supports 64-bit versions of Access, and supports larger data sets with the 64-bit versions.  The plan is to improve on SQL Blob Viewer, while SQL Image Viewer will be updated only with bug fixes.  As both products were developed using different tools, it would be too much work to maintain 2 code bases.

In the near future, probably when we’ve decided if we should support the same views as SQL Image Viewer, we will release SQL Blob Viewer as SQL Image Viewer (new), as the name SQL Image Viewer seems to attract more traffic (I suppose SQL Blob Viewer is just a tad too technical).  When that happens, you will still be able to install SQL Image Viewer (new) alongside SQL Image Viewer (old), so you can still use both versions concurrently.  Existing users with valid licenses can request for a SQL Image Viewer (new) license.

I would encourage you to give SQL Blob Viewer a try if you have not already done so, and let us know what you think.  If you’re a SQL Image Viewer user with a valid maintenance license, contact us at sales@yohz.com for a SQL Blob Viewer license.