Documentation Plugins Business Media Features Data sources

Data sources

The Business Media panel retrieves media data from the connected data source. You can use any suitable option to retrieve data in the base64 format.

A Business Input data source is the quickest way to get started. PostgreSQL is also an excellent choice.

Business Input

You can use a Business Input data source to retrieve any supported Base64 formats and render them on your Grafana dashboard.

PostgreSQL

For media files, the data source must return base64 encoded file content and may return a format definition such as data:video/mp4;base64,ENCODED-CONTENT.

SQL Copy

SELECT
  concat(
    'data:video/mp4;base64,',
    encode(video, 'base64')
  ) as video
from
  videos
where
  name = 'flow';

The PostgreSQL database includes functions for working with the Base64 format.

SQL Copy

SELECT CONVERT_FROM (DECODE('SGVsbG8gV29ybGQh', 'BASE64'), 'UTF-8');
SELECT ENCODE (CONVERT_TO('Hello World!', 'UTF-8'), 'BASE64');

Loading media files into the database

Create tables to store images, video, and audio files.

SQL Copy

CREATE TABLE images (name text, img bytea, UNIQUE(name));
CREATE TABLE videos (name text, video bytea, UNIQUE(name));
CREATE TABLE audios (name text, audio bytea, UNIQUE(name));

Load PDF, PNG, MP4, MP3, and other supported file formats into your database using the Node.js script.

Websocket and MQTT

This blog post contains an example of effective collaboration between the Business Forms panel and two data sources (the Websocket and MQTT) to facilitate streaming images on your Grafana dashboard.