Re: Extending varlena

David Fetter wrote"

<...>
>
> > This'd greatly simplify the
> > cleanup-dead-objects problem, and we could avoid addressing the
> > permissions problem at all, since regular SQL permissions on the table
> > would serve fine. But it's not clear what regular SQL fetch and update
> > behaviors should be like for such a thing. (Fetching or storing the
> > whole blob value is right out, IMHO.) ISTR hearing of concepts roughly
> > like this in other DBs --- does it ring a bell for anyone?
>
> Informix has some pretty good blob-handling:
>
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v10/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.sqlr.doc/sqlrmst101.htm
>

Agreed. I used Informix a few years back in a system that scanned both sides of multi-page financial documents; we stored them in Informix' blobs, which IIRC could be tuned to be given number of bytes. We found that 90% of our images fit in a given size and since Informix raw disk access let them move up the whole blob in a single pass, it was quite fast, and gave us all the warmth and fuzziness of ACID functionality. But we didn't fetch parts of the BLOB -- metadata lived in its own table. There is/was an Illustra/Informix blade which let you in theory do some processing of images (indexing) but that seems like a very specialized case.

Greg Williamson
Senior DBA
DigitalGlobe

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