Hello, I think I'm about to ask a traditional (almost religious) question, but I haven't been able to find a crystal clear answer in the mailing lists so far. Thus, here is my question: I need to store a large number of images in a PostgreSQL database. In my application, this represents a few hundreds of thousands of images. The size of each image is about 100-200 Ko. There is a large turnover in my database, i.e. each image stays about 1 week in the database, then it is deleted. Of course, I need to have a relatively fast access to each one of these images. But more importantly, I need to periodically delete a large number of images in batch process. Moreover, the disk space that is used on the hard-disk to store the images should be kept as small as possible: Precisely, after the aforementioned batch deletions, the table that contains the images should be immediately compacted (I cannot afford the internal use of a "to be deleted" flag, because of the large amount of disk space my database requires). I have three possible implementation choices in PostgreSQL: 1) Storing the images directly on the disk, and storing an URI in the database tables (but this would require a more tricky implementation, and ACID-ity would be difficult to ensure -- after all, a database should abstract the internal storage of data, may it be images). 2) Storing the images in a "bytea" column (but what about the access times, and the batch deletion process?). 3) Storing the images as large objects (this sounds like the best solution to me, but the documentation lacks clarity about the scope of these large objects). Finally, my question is what method would you recommend to me? I thank you much in advance for your answers! ___________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Mail réinvente le mail ! Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface révolutionnaire. http://fr.mail.yahoo.com
