James Watson wrote:
What I was hoping someone could help me out with was identifying the best possible solution to use. 1. How can I store the word doc's in the DB, would it be best to use a BLOB data type?
You can use the column type "bytea", which can store (nearly) arbitrary amounts of binary data.
2. Does Postgres support full text searching of a word document once it is loaded into the BLOB column & how would this work? Would I have to unload each BLOB object, convert it back to text to search, or does Postgres have the ability to complete the full-text search of a BLOB, like MSSQL Server & Oracle do?
There is fulltext indexing support for postgres, look for tsearch2 in the contrib module of postgres. A bytea-column is basically used like a string, so there is no need to load/unload the blob. There is also the concept of a LOB as a distinct entity in postgresql. Accessing those lobs needs special support from your client library (standard libpq provides that support of course). They have the advantage that you can open/seek/close them like a regular file. But the disadvantage is that you can't store them in columns - they are referenced via oids, and you need to store those oids. You also can't put triggers on those LOBs, and I'm not sure how transaction-safe they are.
3. Is there a way to export the Word Doc From the BLOB colum and dump it into a PDF format (I guess I am asking if someone has seen or written a PDF generator script/storedProc for Postgres)?
You can use java as a backend language with postgresql (google for pljava). So you can pretty much do whatever you can do with java. greetings, Florian Pflug
