On Friday 12 June 2009, Scott Ribe <scott_ribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > It's far easier to backup and restore a database than millions of small > > files. Small files = random disk I/O. The real downside is the CPU time > > involved in storing and retrieving the files. If it isn't a show > > stopper, then putting them in the database makes all kinds of sense. > > On the contrary, I think backup is one of the primary reasons to move > files *out* of the database. Decent incremental backup software greatly > reduces the I/O & time needed for backup of files as compared to a pg > dump. (Of course this assumes the managed files are long-lived.) We'll have to just disagree on that. You still have to do level 0 backups occasionally. Scanning a directory tree of millions of files to decide what to backup for an incremental can take forever. And restoring millions of small files can take days. But I concede there are good arguments for the filesystem approach; certainly it's not a one size fits all problem. If your files are mostly bigger than a few MB each, then the filesystem approach is probably better. And of course big database tables get unwieldy too, for indexing and vacuuming - I wouldn't necessarily put most files into the large object interface, just the ones too big to want to fetch all in one piece. -- WARNING: Do not look into laser with remaining eye. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
