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BLOBS and Database Management

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1. What is it about a 200 MB video or audio file that makes it so much more of a database management challenge than a relational database the same size?

2. What can be done to make the data in these multimedia files more manageable, queryable, reportable and analyzable?

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Solution Summary

1. What is it about a 200 MB video or audio file that makes it so much more of a database management challenge than a relational database the same size?

2. What can be done to make the data in these multimedia files more manageable, queryable, reportable and analyzable?

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What is it about a 200 MB video or audio file that makes it so much more of a database management challenge than a relational database the same size?

What can be done to make the data in these multimedia files more manageable, queryable, reportable and analyzable?

Large file objects such as video or audio clips are types of BLOBs. BLOBs are binary large objects - collections of binary data stored as a single entity in a database management system. BLOBs can be stored within the database or outside of it with reference pointers stored in the database.

The biggest areas of impact of BLOBs are:

Performance

The biggest advantage to storing a file-pointer as opposed to the binary data in a database table is speed. This issue can be circumvented in binary storage solutions by keeping the actual BLOB column in a table all by itself with a foreign-key relationship to the other tables -- no need to be reading this table into memory. In my experience, allowing the HTTP server to retrieve an image from the filesystem versus reading binary data from the database table has always been faster.?

As a database grows it will become more difficult to back up. Restoring a backup of a table with over 100 GB of data is time consuming to say the least. Another issue is that all table management functions get slower and slower as the dataset grows.

Storage

The database is going to be a fraction of the size when using file-pointers as opposed to blobs but the filesystem is going to be the same either way. Directories and databases can be secured, backed up and restored equally as well when structured correctly.

Portability

If and when I need to port my application ...

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