Robby Dermody wrote:

> Hey guys, I hope this is the appropriate list for this question. :)

Maybe you should move this to the support list if the thread continues ...

> I was wondering if anyone on this list has heavily made use of BLOBs in
> Firebird. I have a requirement of the construction of a voice audio file
> logging and storage system. Individual audio files will compressed (ogg
> or G.729a) and be probably in the range of 400KB - 3MB. The system must
> be able to scale up to offer storage of hundreds of thousand of these
> files. To do this, I was considering the following 3 possibilities:
>
> 1. Store the files straight on a database, using a journaling filesystem
> ...
>
> 2. This solution would use Firebird (or some other RDBMS) in conjunction
> ...
>
> 3. The 3rd solution would use Firebird all the way. Each column would
> ...
>
> As it is now, I'm thinking #3 is the way to go....any input?

I would choose #2.
It makes backups easier: a small database and a few new files will do for
incremental backups. With #3, if your database gets big you'll have to
backup this large thing for any little change to the data.
#3 may give you transactional control of database updates, but this is
probably not important.
If someone "from the outside" needs to fetch data: #3 will give you this
without that person having to have access to any area on your disks - he
accesses the database and fethces the blobs.
I use both #2 and #3. I use #3 when outside access is desired.
I use #2 for a largish in-house project (it will probably reach a few
million files (TIFF pictures) totaling a few hundred GB (guesstimate)).
In this case the database runs on Win2k, but the files resides on Novell
Netware.

You should be able to find a lot of discussions on this in the archives.


--
Aage J.