For a so large amount of data, SQL storage may not be appropriate, while
native support by filesystems would be more easy to figure out. In that case
you need a very good file server solution, and to integrate a database that
provides links to the actual images on the appropriate filesystems.
That way, the RDBMS database will be kept small and more easily optimizable
for fast indexing of this document database, used for searches and so on.
You should really consider separating image storage (may be on multiple file
servers) from the RDBMS itself, by using hyperlinks to access them from the
database. Then your SQL queries will not retrieve the image data itself but
the hyperlinks to the image data files.
I suggest a dedicated server for the Web server and the RDBMS, plus multiple
file servers to store the actual data. Management of this large database of
files may be integrated within the RDBMS data model (which will hold the
whole directory of files, but not the data).
Data retrieval by the Web server may be operated by CGI or ActiveX scripts
which will make search in the database using SQL queries to perform searches
in the directory tree, and then will collect the hyperlinks stored in the
database to process image data retrieval down to the client. Such a solution
is then very extensible, because it does not limit the number of file
servers which will process file data retrievals.
Received on Sun Nov 08 1998 - 05:58:05 CST
