Re: store pdf files

ivan marchesini wrote on 09.12.2008 11:11:
> Hi to all...
> I need to create a db that contain link to some pdf files..
> At the moment these are simple links (to the files that are stored into
> the file system) storing paths into a column of a dbf table...
>
> I need to manage this data considering that the db I'm going to create
> will be moved in some months to another server...
> so I think that the link to the files positions into the file system
> isn't a valid solution...
>
> can you suggest me a better way to manage this pdf data??
> Each pdf is quite small (<100k)
>
> should I use BLOB?

I have made quite good experience storing BLOBs (bytea in Postgres) inside the
database. I do like the transactional safety I get from the database and the
fact that the database an handle several ten thousands of documents in a single
table without a problem. With a file based solution you'll need to find a way to
distribute the PDFs over different directories to ensure that the file count in
each directory doesn't get too high (at least we had some problems storing about
50.000 documents (Word, pdf, ...) on a HP/UX machine in a single directory.
Especially when trying to access that directory via ftp...

Thomas