Northwind Trading Database has been originally created by Microsoft as a demo of their SQL Server and Access database capabilities. It contains data on customers, employees, customer orders, suppliers etc. of a ficticious Northwind Traders Company, and lends itself nicely for creation of various reports. In April, 2003 Martin Cordova converted Northwind database to the McKoi SQL database format, but that version was lacking images that were part of the original Categories and Employees table.

This version of Northwind database was produced by Scribe. Scribe Processes were used to replicate the Northwind database structure in McKoi SQL database, and populate the tables by retrieving rows from SQL Server-based tables and inserting them into their McKoi counterparts, including the image fields.

A note on the images in Northwind. The BLOBs containing images actually contain 78-byte headers that appear to be OLE fields, and the actual image data (in the BMP format) is located immediately after the header. In order to extract the image data from the BLOBs, a Java function was written and included into the current distribution of Scribe; this function is used in all reports that display images from Northwind. Thus, the non-standard formatting of image BLOBs in Northwind database provided us with an opportunity to demonstrate the ability of Scribe to incorporate custom-written Java code as a plug-in.