Thom, > I'm wondering if anyone has experience of storing and getting images to and > from a database? Yes. For a customer I have one application running for ~8 years which stores images (and various other BLOBS) within a PostgreSQL database. Started with 7.something, now running on 8.3; allways used BYTEA. It is a intranet and extranet application, so it does not get slashdotted or reddited. Another application is a public website, also storing HTML(fragments) and images within a PostgreSQL database. > The benefits I can see is that images are managed in one place and > accessibly easily by all servers. The problem is putting everything in one > place (all eggs in one basket), so if the server goes down, all sites lose > their images once their cache has expired... unless we implemented a system > that falls back to cache if connection fails, even if cache has expired. Your analyzes is correct. Other benefits are: - no filesystem fuss (rights, sharing, locking, names (windows / unix) - options for security: in my application, editing happens within a strongly firewalled VPN. The webserver in the big, bad internet only accesses the database; so the attack vectors are limited. - transactional save: no problems with "partially saved images", "images locked by whatever" - mime information etc. can be stored alongside the bytes - reporting options drawbacks are: - scaling is more challenging: static content from filesystems can be replicated ( as you do), replicating a database is more difficult - different performance characteristics then filesystem (search usually faster (index), but access to image contents has more layers to the disc) - backups of the database grow huge, and usually the dump of a file in the database is bigger then the file itself. (usually, because the effects of compression are hard to judge before) - dump / restore times grow Best wishes, Harald -- GHUM Harald Massa persuadere et programmare Harald Armin Massa Spielberger Straße 49 70435 Stuttgart 0173/9409607 no fx, no carrier pigeon - %s is too gigantic of an industry to bend to the whims of reality -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
