Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 22:51:40 -0700
From: Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org>
To: Dariusz Dzingielewski <darod1@wp.pl>
Cc: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: multimedia data storage issue
Message-ID: <20041109055140.GA1197@winnie.fuhr.org>
References: <00ce01c4c28c$a73bf170$96d31399@DARO>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <00ce01c4c28c$a73bf170$96d31399@DARO>

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 05:38:02PM +0100, Dariusz Dzingielewski wrote:

> I'm a student of Gdansk University of Technology. Now I'm getting
> prepare to write my M.A. thesis. The topic of my work is "An interface
> in multimedia databases in radiology". One of the main tasks which
> I would like to do is to investigate how different database vendors
> store different multimedia data types. It includes data types like
> signals ( 1 and 2 - dimensional ), images, video sequences or
> 3d-objects. I'm searching for any kind of product documentation of
> leading database vendors (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySql, Sybase, and
> others...) which concern on multimedia data storage problem (exactly:
> what data types they use to store multimedia data, what kind of
> data model they use to describe that data, what is the way of access
> to the data )

PostgreSQL has built-in types to store binary data, some geometric
data, and arrays.  See the "Data Types" chapter in the PostgreSQL
documentation for the full story.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/datatype.html

PostgreSQL allows users to create their own types, operators, and
aggregates, so if the built-in capabilities aren't adequate for a
particular application then users can extend the database as needed.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/extend.html

You can see examples of extending PostgreSQL in the contrib directory
of the source code.

This may not be the specific information you seek, but it does
show that users can extend PostgreSQL to fit their needs.

-- 
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/