Re: Extending varlena

David Fetter wrote:
> Folks,
>
> As the things stored in databases grow, we're going to start needing
> to think about database objects that 4 bytes of size can't describe.
> People are already storing video in lo and bytea fields. To date, the
> sizes of media files have never trended downward.
>

I always find these requests puzzling. Is it really useful to store the
data for a jpeg, video file or a 10GB tar ball in a database column?
Does anyone actually search for byte sequences within those data streams
(maybe if it were text)? I would think that the metadata is what gets
searched: title, track, name, file times, size, etc... Database storage
is normally pricey, stocked with 15K drives, so wasting that expensive
storage with non-searchable binary blobs doesn't make much sense. Why
not offload the data to a file system with 7200 RPM SATA drives and
store a reference to it in the db? Keep the db more compact and simpler
to manage.

Andrew Chernow
eSilo, LLC