Storing photos - I'm looking for advice.

Posted in 2003

Topics: Stored Procedures & SPL, Data Types & Schema Design, Platform-Specific Issues

Fred Prose — 19 Nov 2003 06:50:58 -0800 — source: Usenet: comp.databases.informix

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

↪ replying to Fred Prose

Richard Spitz — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 10:03:42 +0100 — source: Usenet: comp.databases.informix

fprose@hotmail.com (Fred Prose) schrieb: >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. That sounds very familiar. >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? Out of the same considerations about BLOBs, we decided against them. Our solution is to store the photos in a network folder that is by default accessible to all our Windows clients. The network share is mounted by all clients upon logon via a startup script, so the path is always the same. The photos are stored with a file name that contains the primary key (employee id in this case), so it is easy to identify the file name from within the application. It doesn't really matter where you store your files, Windows server or AIX server. If you use the latter, you need Samba on the AIX machine or an NTFS client for Windows. HTH, Richard -- +-------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Dr. med Richard Spitz | Tel : +49-89-7095-6110 | | Klinik f'r Anaesthesiologie | FAX : +49-89-7095-6420 | | Klinikum der Univ. M'nchen | Page: +49-89-7095-789-2116 | | 81366 M'nchen, Germany | | +-------------------------------+-------------------------------+