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
shouldbe in an Oracle database.  I think they even built a SAMBA file system on top of Oracle.  It's like a hammer
manufacturertelling 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
filesystem 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
externallyrequires a second mechanism.  That's not necessarily bad -- you probably have a middleware layer, which can
ensurethat it won't deliver the goods unless the user has successfully connected to the database. 

Craig