On Jun 1, 2011, at 1:08 AM, Carl von Clausewitz wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I got a new project, with 100 user in Europe. In this case, I need to handle production and sales processes an its
documentationsin PostgreSQL with PHP. The load of the sales process is negligible, but every user produces 2
transactionin the production process, with 10-30 scanned documents (each are 400kb - 800kb), and 30-50 high resolution
pictures(each are 3-8 MB), and they wanted to upload it to 'somewhere'. 'Somewhere' could be the server files system,
anda link in the PostgreSQL database for the location of the files (with some metadata), or it could be the PostgreSQL
database.
>
> My question is that: what is your opinion about to store the scanned documentation and the pictures in the database?
Thisis a huge amount of data (between daily 188MB and 800MB data, average year is about 1 TB data), but is must be
searchable,and any document must be retrieved within 1 hour. Every documentations must be stored for up to 5 years...
Itmeans the database could be about 6-7 TB large after 5 years, and then we can start to archive documents. Any other
datasize is negligible.
>
> If you suggest, to store all of the data in PostgreSQL, what is your recommendation about table, index structure,
clustering,archiving?
So, you're mostly storing ~1TB of images/year? That doesn't seem so bad. How will the documents be searched? Will their
contentsbe OCR'd out and put into a full text search? How many searches will be going on?
If you're asking whether or not it makes sense to store 7TB of images in the database, as opposed to storing links to
thoseimages and keeping the images themselves on a normal filesystem, there's no clear answer. Check the archives for
prosand cons of each method.