I understand the initial thinking of storing BLOB’s in the database but I don’t think a 2G database is more portable than a 1M database with a tree structure of subdirectories that hold the PDF’s. The tree structure can be Tared/Gzipped at any time to copy in bulk.

I have worked with a VLDB that had BLOB’s in it and the performance was poor. The design team decided to go with file names and pseudo paths to find the images. This repository is one of the largest in the world of GIF and JPG images, a competitor to Getty and now works well.

Maybe I am missing something here, but why is remote access to this database harder than normal if the PDF’s are stored separately? The file locking for user access should be done at the database level, sort of like a check in and check out system.

I guess I am really curious as to why the PDF’s have to be embedded, bore me with the long story :}

Richard

There are three types of people in this world, those that can count and those that cannot. Anon