RE: Storing photos - I'm looking for advice.

One nice thing - depending on your architecture - is to use a HTTP Server, such as Apache (or Tomcat) and request download of pictures through HTTP, via a web control which certainly is available from powerbuilder. Benefits: - download can be async of your app - you can extend the web server with a servlet to fetch the BLOB in the database if you wish to use BLOB... of course, Samba is also a very nice solution... Jean Georges > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-informix-list@iiug.org [mailto:owner-informix-list@iiug.org] > On Behalf Of Fred Prose > Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 15:51 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > Subject: Storing photos - I'm looking for advice. > > We have a need to store photos with our application. While I know I > can use a blob for this data type I'm looking for alternative > suggestions for folks who have similar applications. > > We are a "fat client", Powerbuilder application, with AIX as the > Informix Server. > > One concept I had kicked around was to store a path (or hyperlink) > within a table and physically store the photo outside the actual > Informix database as a standard JPG file. We do a lot of database > exports and imports and blobs don't behave all that well - nor are > they performant in this scenario. > > One choice would be to use a NT server accessable to the clients and > have PowerBuilder access the NT system directly. > > A second choice would be to store the JPG on an AIX file system. I'm > not sure if PowerBuilder could touch this directly, but I had thought > you could shell the program to FTP the file? > > A third choice might be to have the client program call a database > stored procedure, passing the AIX path to the JPG, and have the stored > procedure return the blob. However, I'm not sure how I would "read" > the JPG into the Stored Procedure. How feasible do you think this is? > > Thanks for your consideration. > > Fred Prose > AZ Supreme Court sending to informix-list