Re: What DB to use for lots of IMAGE files?

Company I worked for before had a different solution. You may want to find out if the users will always want to view a set of images. for example, with legal documents they will always want to view the entire document not just a single page in the document (if you have a letter that spans 4 pages no one will ever say "I want to view page 3 of that letter" they'll want to see the whole thing. If this is the case with you then you may want to consider multipage tiffs (no loss in image quality and smaller/page, at 300dpi it'll be about 50k/page). Additionally you may want to consider placing the images separate from the database and just keep the filename and location in the database. This way you have a much smaller database that'll be easily indexed and the images will be available by any platform. We used a separate application to view the multipage tiffs called rastervu. It was fast and very user friendly for the user. In addition, the application won't bother with loading any part of the image until they find the document they want. Another advantage of keeping the images separate is that you can distribute it on anything and your application will always be able to view it. throw it on CDs in a binder and depending on how much information is in the database it may be possible for a person to have a database loaded on their laptop.

hope that helps Received on Thu May 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT