Re: Non-text database theory

On 6 Sep, 03:53, Tim X <t..._at_nospam.dev.null> wrote: ...
> In most cases however, you do have meta information about the data. This
> could be things like the date and time the data was obtained, the
> location, interesting characteristics, data size etc. This is the data I would
> store in the database together with information about where the file is
> stored in the filesystem. The database could be responsible for
> generating unique filenames, which is very useful if you have lots of
> them as you don't have to think about it and you can use names that are
> less user friendly, such as just sequencial numbers etc. The DB might
> even manage a special filesystem hierarchy, grouping files into
> directories based on certain meta data attributes.

Your description matches what I want, I am not sufficiently familiar with the terminology to realize that what I was asking for was not a database as such.

This must have been done thousands of times already. I don't want to invent wheels, so is there a description around on how to do these things? One question which immediately comes to mind is how to protect
the logged files from being tampered with.

> This would give you the best of both worlds in that you can obtain lists
> of data files from the database that represent data that meet certain
> characteristics e.g. all data from a particular location, date, time etc
> and at the same time, allow you to use other data processing
> applications on the data directly at the filesystem level and whthout
> the additional DBMS layer (assuming the processing doesn't change meta
> information stored in the database).
>
> The other advantage of this approach is that you won't need one of the
> larger commercial databases, such as Oracle or DB2. In fact, you could
> probably use things like sql lite, mysql or even Berkley DB hashes.

Ah. Just what I want. Thanks for clarifying the big picture.

Rune Received on Sat Sep 06 2008 - 09:50:52 CEST