I have submitted a proposal for the project pgAdmin 4 bytea support. The project discusses storing media content (images, audio, video) as bytea. However, I have a quick question. What does bytea data look like typically when storing media content? What I had in mind is, media contents that uses MIME type, which are rendered as part of HTML. For example, the following is rendered as a red dot:
This string is decoded to bytea, and I stored it in a bytea column.
What are some other examples of using bytea to store media content, not necessarily using the MIME type? Is there a way to detect the type of these media (audio, image) stored in bytea?
When I have stored small media items in bytea columns in the past, I just stored the data. I vaguely recall I did store the mime type in another column, but that may not be the case in all scenarios (e.g. when a system is designed to store only PNGs). I think you should assume it's raw data only, and try to determine the file type by examining the data;
Another question I had is, I read that there are performance-related issues for storing media in bytea. Are there practical ways to store bytea data that does not face performance-related issues? For example, storing large media content using multiple bytea parts, and reassembling them together once retrieved from the database?
Not that I'm aware of. For larger objects, most people store them externally (which of course loses ACID properties). There are certainly applications for storing smaller objects directly in the database though - and some folks have done work in the past with index types and operators/functions for finding and comparing images for example, so there are also benefits other than ACID to storing data in this way.