Re: Question re large objects

Well, as I said before I really just don't like the idea of storing binary
files or even large text files in a RDBMS (which was reinforced by my
learning a little about large objects)..

    I have written several applications for the recruiting industry and have
stored text resumes in the database (with a MS-Word doc counterpart as a
flat-file) and found that works rather well. The only reason that I stored
the resumes in the database was so I could search them with ease.. The tuple
size being BLCKSZ hindered that a bit but I've been limping by with the
BLCKSZ increased to 32k, oddly enough there is a thread on -HACKERS on why
that might not be such a great idea. Regardless --  this tuple size problem
will be squished with TOAST in 7.1 within the next few months.

    Binary files have a tendency to be much larger than ASCII text files and
generally you're not going to perform any searching on them, at least not
with SQL, so I'm left seeing only problems and overhead associated with
storing binary files in the database... I'm sure there are some situations
where storing them in the database might be the best option but I haven't
run into that situation yet.. With the MS-Word resumes, I store them in a
common directory (they can only have 1 in the application I'm speaking of )
and they're named with their ID, which is taken from the ID of the
applicants record in the database. That's easy enough to do and it would be
just a little more work to be able to store multiple resumes in the same
directory for the same person as the ID is always unique (adding a -1 -2 etc
to the filename would be a quick way to store multiples)..

Just my opinion and as we've seen, I can be and often am --- wrong! :-)

-Mitch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris" <csmith@squiz.net>
To: "Pgsql-Php" <pgsql-php@postgresql.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 2:02 PM
Subject: RE: [PHP] Question re large objects


> I'm in the (slow) process of writing a tutorial for this sort of thing (ie
> how to do it etc).
> This has probably been discussed before, but I'm looking for some
positives
> & negatives for storing files in the database (I think you can use a
switch
> on dump which dumps EVERYTHING, but I could be wrong), and some positives
&
> negatives for outside the database in a seperate directory.
> Can someone send me some pointers & experiences :) (It doesn't have to go
> back to the list if no-one else is interested).
> Thanks & Regards,
> ------------------------
> Chris Smith
> http://www.squiz.net
>
>