Re: [GENERAL] postgreSQL for storing a database of documents

On Tue, 4 May 1999, Raphael Finkel wrote:

# Is PostgreSQL appropriate for a database of documents?  I see several
# potential problems.
#
# 1.  Tuples are limited to 8KB.  I assume even the "text" type is limited
# that way.  But my documents may be longer than that.

    This isn't a problem, I store all of my photographs in postgres.

# 2.  I need to be able to search by content.  I can use a
# regular-expression search in a SELECT ... WHERE clause, but I expect
# that to be exceedingly inefficient.  I would prefer a GLIMPSE-like
# search ability.

    This is a problem, unless you use one of the keyword index things
people have been talking about.  I prefer a glimpse or such in this
situation.

# 3.  I will also be conducting searches by some other fields (like author
# or call number).  But only one field can be a primary key.  Will
# selection by other fields be terribly inefficient for large numbers
# (about 200K) of large tuples (ranging from about 100B to say 10KB)?

    Primary key shouldn't be any of these fields, but you can index on
whatever you want.  This is where the RDBMS is useful, as you can
instantly get all documents by a given author and/or on a given date range
and/or a given topic.

--
SA, beyond.com           My girlfriend asked me which one I like better.
pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings <dustin@spy.net>
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