Broken Links...Re: To BLOB Or Not To BLOB

On Mon, Apr 17, 2000 at 06:12:37PM +0930, Stephen Davies wrote:
> G'day.
>
> I do a lot of work with the BASIS textual/multi-media RDBMS package and run
> into this question all the time.
>
> There is one pretty basic answer:
>
> If you leave BLOBS lying around in the file system - particularly if it is a
> Novell etc file system - people move them and the links get broken.

I counter that people would not be able to move these files if you had used a
solid file permissions policy.  For this type of application, you must not give
write/change permissions to ANYONE other then the database operator itself, the
uid/gid reserved for the application.  Follow a strict policy and you won't
have problems.  Create enough "helper" programs to recover from broken links,
and you're fine.

    * CRC each file
    * Use a 'find' program to parse directories and match file names.
    * Check the CRC (md5sums would work nicely)
    * Have a DB routine run periodically to find and fix broken links.

This would also help you find multiple copies of a file on your system, perhaps
help you clean up extreaneous junk...

--
  Chad "^chewie, gunnarr" Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net>
              http://wookimus.net/chewie