[ILUG] Database backed web sites in Ireland

[Niall]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2000 at 12:20:20AM +0000, John McCormac wrote:
> Niall wrote:

> > of course built around an RDBMS but the image files use the "file system as
> > database" principle - for the business needs, putting these images into a
> > database as BLOBs made no sense whatsoever.
> 
> Whereas online.ie has the big iron, everyone else has to make clever and
> efficient use of the hardware available. This means that people without
> online.ie's resources have to implement database driven sites where the
> database does all the work but effectively points to a static set of
> files rather than actually containing the complete data in the database.
> In fact it would be a logical use of resources if the image elements in
> Online's databases were just stored URLs - its just that their database
> is probably a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than most of the
> other sites.

It was nothing to do with use of resources - just a serious lack of belief
on my part that using BLOBs gave me anything. In that context, I was very
interested to see Kate's reply in this thread where he said

> It's also not quite true of online.ie - we ended up not trusting Oracle's
> ideas of BLOBs & CLOBs, so big objects aren't stored in the database, but
> on the filesystem, and just a reference & meta information is stored in
> the database...

I'm not a big database expert, but I just don't get it where BLOBs are
concerned, apart from the marketing needs of Oracle and the like who want to
say "You can store everything in our database". This refers to the use of
BLOBs for content storage e.g. images, sound, video where these are all
discrete chunks. I have no problem with the idea of BLOBs for other data
which doesn't fit into the conventional types mold e.g. CAD objects where a
finished drawing is made by scanning a database to assemble from parts.



Kindest regards,


Niall  O Broin