From: Craig A. James <cjames@modgraph-usa.com>
To: Nate Byrnes <nate@qabal.org>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Storing Digital Video
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 07:18:49 -0800
Message-ID: <43EB5D59.1030207@modgraph-usa.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <43EB475C.3040708@qabal.org>
References: <3cf983d0601311632t4a2f068au1f958746c2b092a7@mail.gmail.com>
<200602060930.31144.albert@sedifa.com>
<43EB475C.3040708@qabal.org>
Nate Byrnes wrote:
> I must claim some ignorance, I come from the application world... but,
> from a data integrity perspective, it makes a whole lot of sense to
> store video, images, documents, whatever in the database rather than on
> the file system external to it. Personally, I would use LOB's, but I do
> not know the internals well enough to say LOBs or large columns.
> Regardless, there are a lot of compelling reasons ranging from software
> maintenance, disk management, data access control, single security layer
> implementation, and so on which justify storing data like this in the
> DB. Am I too much of an Oracle guy?
Yes, you are too much of an Oracle guy ;-). Oracle got this notion that they could conquer the world, that EVERYTHING should be in an Oracle database. I think they even built a SAMBA file system on top of Oracle. It's like a hammer manufacturer telling you the hammer is also good for screws and for gluing. It just ain't so.
You can store videos in a database, but there will be a price. You're asking the database to do something that the file system is already exceptionally good at: store big files.
You make one good point about security: A database can provide a single point of access control. Storing the videos externally requires a second mechanism. That's not necessarily bad -- you probably have a middleware layer, which can ensure that it won't deliver the goods unless the user has successfully connected to the database.
Craig
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Cc: cjames@modgraph-usa.com, nate@qabal.org
Subject: Re: Storing Digital Video
In-Reply-To: <43EB5D59.1030207@modgraph-usa.com>
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