Hello everybody. this is my first post in this forum.
Actually i am looking for how to store binary files (like music files, doc files) inside Oracle database, specifically Oracle 10G.
If they are not physically stored, how references are made to those files?
How online music store tackles the situation with huge no. of files?
plz help.

s_de

Hi,
ORACLE supports Binary Large Objects or BLOBs. In fact it's a data type and has been a data type since like 8i -I believe.

It is designed specifically for multi-media. That's all I know, sorry.

Hope that at least moves you in the right direction.
Vmusic

At least in my experience, storing BLOBs within a database has been a poor choice. The performance impact on the end user is usually significant, if not enough to be a "deal breaker" because database engines don't often handle BLOB transfers very well.

I've had much better luck storing a reference to the BLOB, such as a URL or UNC pathname. This allows your code to use tools built for the job such as FTP to move data wholesale from one box (a server) to another (client). This also allows you to use a "divide and conquer" approach as your needs grow, so that you can have the files served up by another machine(s) when your database becomes too busy to do the job.

-PatP

web servers have this thing called cache

when several requests are made for the same file, the web server can send it from cache rather than having to read it off the disk again

you totally destroy this if the web server doesn't have access to the file on the file system, and instead must pass a request to a database server to pull the file out of a table

of course, database servers have cache too, but the inter-server traffic can be totally avoided

and let's not even mention the client's browser cache, which can't be used if the requesting url is dynamic (e.g. playmusic.html?clip=937)

which most often don't cache LOBs anyway...

How about a BIT table which holds the position and value (0 or 1) of each bit in the BLOB.... then write a program to reconstruct the binary from the query result. Of course, you will have to have a foreign key referencing a bit lookup table in order to enforce the ones and zeroes. (In case you ever want to move to ternary digits and an associated acronym)

associated acronym!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

never heard that one before

urquel, you slay me

what a great sense of humour!!!!

Why, I do believe I'd enjoy playing with them!

-PatP

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