Re: Storing Digital Video

    Thanks, until Postgres can pay my bills (hopefully soon...) I will 
have to be an Oracle guy.  Aside from the filesystem being better at 
managing large files (which I do agree) are there performance 
implications for the storage in the DB?
    Where I work, the question is not can you add the security code to 
the middleware, but how many middlewares and applications will need to 
be updated.
    Regards,
    Nate

Craig A. James wrote:
> Nate Byrnes wrote:
>> I must claim some ignorance, I come from the application world... 
>> but, from a data integrity perspective, it makes a whole lot of sense 
>> to store video, images, documents, whatever in the database rather 
>> than on the file system external to it. Personally, I would use 
>> LOB's, but I do not know the internals well enough to say LOBs or 
>> large columns.  Regardless, there are a lot of compelling reasons 
>> ranging from software maintenance, disk management, data access 
>> control, single security layer implementation, and so on which 
>> justify storing data like this in the DB.  Am I  too much of an 
>> Oracle guy?
>
> Yes, you are too much of an Oracle guy ;-).  Oracle got this notion 
> that they could conquer the world, that EVERYTHING should be in an 
> Oracle database.  I think they even built a SAMBA file system on top 
> of Oracle.  It's like a hammer manufacturer telling you the hammer is 
> also good for screws and for gluing.  It just ain't so.
>
> You can store videos in a database, but there will be a price.  You're 
> asking the database to do something that the file system is already 
> exceptionally good at: store big files.
>
> You make one good point about security:  A database can provide a 
> single point of access control.  Storing the videos externally 
> requires a second mechanism.  That's not necessarily bad -- you 
> probably have a middleware layer, which can ensure that it won't 
> deliver the goods unless the user has successfully connected to the 
> database.
>
> Craig
>
> !DSPAM:43eb5e8970644042098162!
>