On Monday 10 December 2001 12:40 pm, Jason Earl wrote:
> "Travis Bear" <ec9098@www2.us.postgresql.org> writes:
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm kind of a database newbie in general, so be nice to me if this
> > is a bonehead question. I am building a java servlet based web
> > application to manage photos and images. My first thougth has been
> > to store the images as BLOBs in the database, but I read one user
> > say that you're better off not using BLOBs. Instead, he says, store
> > your large data objects as files on the filesystem, and just use the
> > database to store the path to the file and any file-related meta
> > data.
>
> simply base64 encoding the images and inserting them into a big fat
> text field. However, I am doing this because these images should get
I kinda like the Base64 idea. But if you are concerned about the performance
of decoding base64 all the time and you are using Apache with mod_rewrite,
you could devise a scheme where an access to a image file, if not present on
the disk, would redirect to a servlet that would retrieve the file from the
database and write it to disk and then do a redirect to the file on disk.
Further accesses would get the file directly off disk if present instead of
redirecting to the servlet and getting it from the database.
This scheme, though a bit complicated to implement since mod_rewrite needs
special regexp-like directives in .htaccess files or your httpd.conf file,
can be nice since it can give the performance of having the files on disk and
at the same time, the consistency of having all data in the database.
Routines that update an image should delete the image file on disk so that on
the next access to the image, mod_rewrite will redirect to the servlet to get
the image fresh from the database and write it out again to disk.
Bob