On Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:57:21 -0800 Ron <[email protected]> wrote: > Quite a few actually *can* deal with this kind of data; it's been a > fairly mature field for a decade or more already.
Try 60 years and MUMPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS The company I work for makes the descendant of MUMPS. We're one of the best in the world with unstructured, arbitrary data. We succeed where Oracle and Microsoft and Google and most others fail. I jokingly refer to us as the biggest name in health care you never heard of, but you know our customers. We have a family of classes for handling large amounts of data (> ~3.5 million characters per object) called stream objects. Common examples of stream objects are x-ray imaging and PDF scans of documents. Stream objects can be stored in global nodes but the typical use and best practice is to store these data as files on the filesystem. Why? Because storing them in the database fills the in-memory index with unneeded bloat which slows down the process of data retrieval. At this point you should re-read Mark's posts because they're spot on, and Mark does a better job at explaining what databases are for and how they work than I can. Mark is a database person. I'm "just" a sysadmin for some of the best database people in the world :). -- \m/ (--) \m/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
