I'm trying to write a simple program to grab satellite images from the web. They are updated about every hour. After fetching the image, I check to see if it is current and store it in a MySQL database. Only one table in the database: 
mysql> describe gw_ir;
+------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| image_id   | int(11)     |      | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| image_name | varchar(50) | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| image_file | mediumblob  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

[download]
The script is primitive, as this is I am definetely a DBI amateur: 
use LWP::Simple;
use DBI;

$url     = "http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_ir_west.gif";
$file    = "/usr/home/mhearse/weather_images/sat_ir_west.gif";
$newfile = "/usr/home/mhearse/weather_images/latest.gif";
($min, $hour, $day, $month, $year) = (localtime)[1,2,3,4,5];
$image_name = "$month-$day-$year-$hour:$min";
getstore($url, $file);

if (-s $file != -s $newfile) {
   rename $file, $newfile;
   $img_data = getFile($newfile);
   $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:weather_images",
             "user", "********")
             or die("Error! $!\nAborting");
   $sql = qq(INSERT INTO gw_ir
                (image_name, image_file)
                 VALUES ("$image_name", "$image_file"));
   $sth   = $dbh->prepare($sql);
   $sth->execute or die("\nError executing SQL statement! $DBI::errstr
+");
   $dbh->disconnect;
} else {
   print "file is current\n";
}

sub getFile {
  my($file) = @_;
  my $fh;
  unless (open $fh, "<", $file) {
    die "Error opening $file : $!\n";
  }
  my $data;
  { local $/ = undef; $data = <$fh>; }
  close $fh;
  return $data;
}

[download]
The main problem I'm having is with the storing the gif as BLOB. It doesn't seem to be working. Am I doing something obviously wrong? Also, I'm downloading the image every 60 minutes (it's only about 100k). Then comparing it to the previous to see if it is newer. Is there a better way to see if the image is current? I appreciate any help.

In reply to Working with DBI and BLOB by mhearse

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