Re: Files within the database?

It all depends on your point of view. At one site I work on, we store all those things you mentioned and more inside the Database (in long_raw columns) for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it greatly simplified our security. We knew we could easily control access to something within the database and we had/have very little confidence that the people administering the production boxes knew what they were doing. It made it much easier to refer to the database as the corporate repository and the only complex security system we had to maintain was completely internal to our application. It also simplifies things like migration, we only have to export the database as a whole without worrying about what else needs to go with it.

Another reason that may or may not be relevant was the performance of the Oracle Context option search tool. It seems to perform better on word documents that are actually stored internally.

I realise that security and use of the context option may not be concerns for a large percentage of sites, but there you go.

Rod Stewart

Sean Dolan wrote in message ...
>Was wondering how practical this might be on the Oracle side of the
house... i.e. storing files (like BMPs, JPGs, GIFs, Word Documents... just about anything) INSIDE the database in a table... would this not be BAD? Wouldn;t it be better to have a pointer to some file that resides on the harddisk rather than the actual file in the Table?
>
>Thanks,
>Sean Dolan
>
>
Received on Wed Oct 14 1998 - 00:00:34 CDT