Re: Storing Digital Video

Nate Byrnes wrote:
> I must claim some ignorance, I come from the application world... but,
> from a data integrity perspective, it makes a whole lot of sense to
> store video, images, documents, whatever in the database rather than on
> the file system external to it. Personally, I would use LOB's, but I do
> not know the internals well enough to say LOBs or large columns.
> Regardless, there are a lot of compelling reasons ranging from software
> maintenance, disk management, data access control, single security layer
> implementation, and so on which justify storing data like this in the
> DB. Am I too much of an Oracle guy?

Yes, you are too much of an Oracle guy ;-). Oracle got this notion that they could conquer the world, that EVERYTHING should be in an Oracle database. I think they even built a SAMBA file system on top of Oracle. It's like a hammer manufacturer telling you the hammer is also good for screws and for gluing. It just ain't so.

You can store videos in a database, but there will be a price. You're asking the database to do something that the file system is already exceptionally good at: store big files.

You make one good point about security: A database can provide a single point of access control. Storing the videos externally requires a second mechanism. That's not necessarily bad -- you probably have a middleware layer, which can ensure that it won't deliver the goods unless the user has successfully connected to the database.

Craig