Re: Un Structured Data -- Sore In Side Database or Out Side Database?

Bob,

A customer of mine had all their scanned documents stored in a directory hierarchy on an NTFS filesystem.
At some time they tested a restore. Just restoring the directory structure took over a week. They skipped restoring the data itself, it was simply not feasable within a reasonable timeframe. I must say that every doc was identified by a so called GUID. The GUID was cut into 8 parts, and those 8 parts formed an 8-level hierarchy in the directory structure.  

The 'metadata' of the docs was stored in an Oracle database. After endless debates the software vendor agreed on a conversion from FS-based to DB-based storage.
>From the start on it was a huge relief, much more scaleable, big
performance gains, better manageability, better restorability, no more headaches about divergency between metadata and documents stored (no more orphan docs, no more childless metadata rows).

Just one example, but good enough for me to at least consider storing inside the database.

Mind that a filesystem (directory structure) is not built/designed for scaleable access of thousands (millions) of files by many, many concurrent sessions. Espcially the write operations (insert) have a very poor scaleability.

Just my EUR. 0.02,

Best regards,

Carel-Jan Engel

===
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. (Derek Bok) ===

On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 08:01 -0800, Bob Robert wrote:

> Gurus
>
> Is there any best practice where to store unstructured data? Is it
> inside of the database or our side of the database? I know keeping in
> side DB would force to increase DB size very rapidly. Please comment
> based no your experience
>
> Thanks
> Bob
>
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