At 09:42 AM 7/3/02 +0100, Tim Ward wrote: >I was thinking more of an application like an access control system, where >there might be tens of thousands of photographs of people, each a jpeg of a >small number of K, or a catalogue, again with thousands of tiny photos. > >The experiment I did with 500,000 operating system files was to see whether >smallish blobs (bits of text, in this case, which I didn't need to search or >index) were better stored as disk files or in an SQL Server database. The >database won hands down on all counts.
Not meaning to put down MySQL, but have you tried this also with a ReiserFS filesystem? I had a similar number of files, about 70 GByte worth on an ext2 filesystem. Moved them to a ReiserFS filesystem and found I only needed 51 GByte. And got a much faster system... The main gain of MySQL is probably that MySQL packs the data tighter together, which in the end causes fewer hard disk head movents and less data to be transferred. And if you use indexes, your directory searches are binary chops rather than linear searches. ReiserFS does that also, but at a file system level. If you need to port your application to the outside world where you don't have control over your file systems, MySQL would be the way to go for this application. If you _do_ have control over the filesystem being used and you can use ReiserFS and you don't need MySQL specific features, then I wouldn't be so sure. Just my 2 eurocents worth... Liz --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
