Steve -

Thanks for the reply. Your response is something that I half
expected, but didn't have the blob experience to be sure. We have one
SQL Server db that is 105GB; that is probably an intermediate size.
One customer gave us a sample that just in TIFF blobs alone is > 130GB.

The company that I currently work for stopped recommending FB for
our larger customers some time ago. Apparently it had to do with the
time involved in fetching blobs from large db's, say > 50GB.

To be clear, I don't think that we've done comprehensive research
and tuning for this issue. So any pointer, recommendations, references
etc. would be appreciated. Nothing you recommend could be too simple
or complex. We just need to acquire a more comprehensive knowledge of
how to efficiently manage extremely large quantities of blobs in FB.

Thanks for any reply.

David Keith

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Steve Wiser <steve@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Keith,
>
> How large is extremely large? We have a fdb of about 175 GB storing
> TIFF and PDF blobs and it runs fine...
>
> -steve
>
> dkeith2 wrote:
> >
> > Are there any references available that would detail the tricks /
> > traps relating to the storage and retrieval of large quantities of
> > blobs in Firebird?
> >
> > We have a system that is implemented in both FB and SQL Server. FB
> > performance is good or optimizable in all areas except for binary blob
> > storage.
> >
> > I read that blob data is stored in pages and if the blob is bigger
> > than the page it spans multiple pages, which causes the slowness etc.
> >
> > We have found that when databases get large in FB performance really
> > suffers. In SQL Server you don't notice a difference.
> >
> > Are there ways to optimize the performance of blob lookup and
> > retrieval in FB? Our blobs are binary TIFFs, so I don't think filters
> > would help.
> >
> > Thanks for any pointers/suggestions.
> >
> > David Keith
> >
> >
>