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

On Sun, 04 May 1997 20:35:07 -0700, Mirwais Qader <mq_at_wohl.slh.wisc.edu> wrote:

>I am in the process of evaluating how to set up a database of about
>1,000,000 (million) images of products, medical files etc... The

An average TIFF image (of a document, picture, etc) is about 150K including a few index values. Have you done any storage calculations yet?

I believe you'll find that if they can afford the hardware to store 1M * 150K images, they have plenty of money for the DBMS it will need to run.

Additionally, a few scanners capable of handling that volume of paper will easily run over $100,000, making the cost of the DBMS insignificant.

In any event, although it's possible to store large files in a database, I've had much better performance by storing the image with the native underlying filesystem, and only storing the image path and filename in the database.

Using one of the keys as part of the path name will allow you to limit the number of images in a single directory to an optimum number for the filesystem.

For example, under NT, a maximum of a few hundred files per directory seems to be optimum, so one system I wrote stores the files as:

\\servername\images\<year>\<month>\<day>\<first 4 digits of image ID>\<imageID.TIF>
>
>How can I set this DB up? What DBMS would be good for this?

I haven't had any major problems with SQL Server, although there are a number of other products that would also work well.

>Can I do this using SQL Server? My user is probably not going
>to be able to afford something like the Oracle Workgroup Server
>and would need to run it off of Windows NT or 95. What DBMS's
>are affordable enough for a small user community of 5 or so
>people?
>
>What format should the image data be stored in (.jpg, .gif, .tif,
>....)?

TIF works well for scanned text. JPG works better for non-text images.

Terry

Terry Carmen
Meadowbrook Software
tpcarmen_at_servtech.DeleteThisToSendMail.com

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