You should indeed consider moving your images out of the database (and simply referring to their name/location in the DB) if/when you switch to a full RDBMS (eg MySQL). Moving the database + images isn't too bad, I don't think. For MySQL at least you can do a dump of the table structures and data. Then you can simply tar/zip that up along with your image directory, and you should be good to go. Same can be done with an Access .mdb file

As to your actual question on OLE I'm afraid you'll have to wait for a monk worthier than I for some wisdom on that.