Re: Re: Anyone using SPOPS to store BLOBs?

It's a long story, but the short answer is that I really *do* need to store files into a database. It makes them more portable and accessible.

It's unlikely that we'll approach a file that's 2G -- I have tried various files up to a 12M example that we have, and they all worked the way I expected, except for the side effect of adding single quotes around the entire files' contents when I extract the file back out of the database.

The only time we'll need to access the file is when we copy it back out to the file system for processing -- taking just the file name isn't going to work for us because that file may no longer be available when we want to do our processing.

--t. alex
Life is short: get busy!

Comment on Re: Re: Anyone using SPOPS to store BLOBs?

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Re: Re: Re: Anyone using SPOPS to store BLOBs? by bunnyman (Hermit) on Jun 24, 2003 at 20:02 UTC
It's unlikely that we'll approach a file that's 2G What I meant was the entire database could become 2GB in total size after adding enough files to it. If the DB is stored in one file, that would be a problem unless your system supports big files or the database is split over a few files.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Anyone using SPOPS to store BLOBs? by richardX (Pilgrim) on Jun 25, 2003 at 18:59 UTC
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	[reply]
Re(4): Anyone using SPOPS to store BLOBs? by talexb (Chancellor) on Jun 25, 2003 at 19:23 UTC
I guess I am really curious as to why the PDF’s have to be embedded, bore me with the long story :} Unfortunately I can't get really get into the technical details, for reasons that have to do with confidentiality. I am not committed to putting PDFs into a database -- but it's a design choice we'd like to try out to see what we can see about performance and how it simplifies the code. If we end up with 10,000 documents each of which is 10K (say), then we're over the 2G limit, and we have a problem. The existing solution uses a directory structure and works well -- but we're exploring alternatives. --t. alex Life is short: get busy!	[reply]