I was recently working on an environment where there was a need to find find out corrupted image streams in a database in the form of BLOBs. You might say why not run a CHECKDB on the entire table and find out if there are any inconsistencies. Well if it were that simple, I probably wouldn’t have started penning this post! 🙂 Let me give you a bit of history here to set things in perspective…. The binary stream was inconsistent when the data was inserted into the database. So this was a clear case of “Garbage In Garbage Out”.

What made the problem take a convoluted turn was the use of this BLOB data in SQL Server Reporting Services reports. If you have reports which convert BLOB data into images before rendering them into reports, then the rendering would fail if the binary stream is inconsistent. When you have a few images in the table, it’s quite possible to manually identify the inconsistent BLOB data. Now when the number of images stored in the database moves to tens of millions, I am sure the DBA will find it very amusing to spend a years looking through the images manually! So what really shows up as the image when you have a corrupted binary stream in a SSRS report is just a Red “x”! (see left).

Since the manual option didn’t seem very palatable, I thought it might be time for some automation. And that is where C# came to my rescue. The logic was very simple. Pick an image of the database, store it on the filesystem in JPG/PNG/BMP format and then verify it’s validity. There are three ways that the image being rendered can have an issue:

1. There is no image in the BLOB column in the database i.e. the column value is NULL. This is quite easy to circumvent by using the IS NOT NULL filter or the ISNULL function.
2. The image column value is not null but it stores a 0KB image which will again create a problem during the report rendering phase. This still ain’t that bad a problem as we can search for images with binary data values as 0x00 or 0x0 with relative ease!
3. The third type of image is the main problem where there might be a few bit flips or part of the binary stream is inconsistent. This makes it exceptionally difficult to locate beforehand which images will fail to render while generating the report.

0x89504E470D0A1A0A0000000….
NULL
0x0
0x89504E47309AFD068163D86……

If you look at the binary streams above, the last three fall under categories described above. All the image streams in read will create a problem. The first and last streams look valid but the fourth stream is invalid even though if it has a valid header.

Using the code below, you could identify the three different failure scenarios by scanning all the images that are stored as BLOBs in your database. Though if you have the need to undertake this task, then it is advisable that you perform such a validity check during off business hours.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

namespace ImageCheck
{

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// While loop to iterate through the database table
int ctr = 1;
while (ctr <= 24)
{
ReValidateImage(ctr);
ctr++;
}

// Wait for user input before exiting
Console.ReadKey();
}


public static void ReValidateImage(int SNo)
{

bool vImgCheck;
// SQL query to fetch the image
string sql = "SELECT SNo,[Document] from dbo.myTable WHERE SNo = " + SNo.ToString();

SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection("Server=.;Integrated Security=True;database=ReportDB");
SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(sql, con);
SqlCommandBuilder MyCB = new SqlCommandBuilder(da);
DataSet ds = new DataSet("MyImages");
byte[] MyData = new byte[0];

// Fetch the image into a dataset
da.Fill(ds, "MyImages");
DataRow myRow;

myRow = ds.Tables["MyImages"].Rows[0];

// Store the image on the filesystem
try
{
if (myRow["document"] != null)
{
MyData = (byte[])myRow["document"];
int ArraySize = new int();
ArraySize = MyData.GetUpperBound(0);
// Handle ZERO kb image size
if (ArraySize > 0)
{
FileStream fs = new FileStream(@"C:\1.jpg", FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
fs.Write(MyData, 0, ArraySize);
fs.Close();
// Check image saved on filesystem for validity
using (FileStream fsRead = new FileStream(@"C:\1.jpg", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite))
{
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(fsRead))
{
vImgCheck = IsValidImage(fsRead);
if (vImgCheck == true)
Console.WriteLine("Image is OK for iteration " + SNo.ToString());
else
Console.WriteLine("Image is corrupt for iteration " + SNo.ToString());
}
}
}
else
{
// Report ZERO kb images
Console.WriteLine("Image size is ZERO for iteration " + SNo.ToString());
}
}
}
catch (SystemException ex)
{
// Handle NULLs extracted from the database
if (ex.GetType().ToString() == "System.InvalidCastException")
Console.WriteLine("Cannot export image for iteration " + SNo.ToString());
}
}
// Function to check validity of an image
public static bool IsValidImage(Stream stream)
{
try
{
try
{
// Try and check if the seek is possible. If it fails, then we have problems!
stream.Position = 0;
stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
}
catch { }
using (Image img = Image.FromStream(stream))
{
// IF there are no errors, then report success
img.Dispose();
return true;
}
}
catch
{
return false;
}


}
}

A sample output of the above code when executed against a table which has two columns SNo (int) and Document (image) with SNo being the primary key would look like this:

Image is OK for iteration 1
Image size is ZERO for iteration 2
Cannot export image for iteration 3
Image is corrupt for iteration 4
Image is corrupt for iteration 5
Image is corrupt for iteration 6

So what can you do with the above code¹? Firstly, you would need to modify the functions to align with the schema of your table. The second TO-DO item would be to write another function for storing the inconsistent binary stream row details in a text file or into a database table. You could even add an user interface if you want to go all out fancy!

^{Disclaimer: This Sample Code is provided for the purpose of illustration only and is not intended to be used in a production environment. THIS SAMPLE CODE AND ANY RELATED INFORMATION ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.}