Re: using Postgres to store many small files

On Thursday 04 March 2004 01:03, Matthew Hixson wrote:
[snip]
> I recently discovered the Hibernate project and was pleasantly
> surprised how simple it was to store an image in Postgres as a bytea
> using Hibernate's BLOB support. I'm wondering if Postgres would have
> any problem handling all of our files if we were to put them into
> Postgres as bytea data. And how well would Postgres scale as the
> number of files increased?

PG itself cares nothing whether the data is text or bytea - it won't be able
to compress the data much presumably (if they are GIF/JPEG). The only issue I
can think of is that you will have to access these images through PG rather
than the filesystem - worth checking there aren't any little utilities
relying on that.

> Our Java application and Postgres are currently running on the same
> machine, a dual Xeon 2.6Ghz with 1GB of RAM. We are currently not
> working this machine very hard at all.

More RAM might be an idea - it's not expensive. Also - consider whether this
will have an impact on your backup plans.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd