Re: PDFs (or binary objects) in the database... When?
- From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bob_murching@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:34:28 +0100
On 10/19/05, Murching, Bob <bob_murching@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> We design a fair number of J2EE applications that (increasingly) require
> storage and query/presentation of binary documents.... generally PDFs.
>
In addition to the other replies you've got I guess it depends what you mean
by querying binary documents. If what is actually meant is a straightforward
query on data relating to the document and then presentation of the docs
then I'd say for low volumes of data there isn't much in it. If you mean
full text search and so on then Intermedia has got to be in the frame and
I'd probably store these directly in the db as a result. (Yes Intermedia can
index bfiles but it just feels better to be querying db stored objects using
db technologies) if you go down the Verity etc route then clearly I'd
probably pick a filesystem.
Occasionally our DBAs have been consulted with that age-old "should we store
> these in the database or on a filesystem?" question by developers and
> analysts when designing the application. So far we've tended to put them on
> the filesystem but honestly that's because we don't have any guidance on
> when it makes sense to store them in the DB.
>
The biggest thing for me is recoverability. Storing the files on the
filesystem doesn't give you the same recoverability (you'd have to keep the
two different backups in sync or have a bulletproof way of resolving
differences in a failure situation, both of these add to pressure on the dba
sysadmin at the wrong time. )
Cheers
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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