Hello all,
This discussion appeared recently: >| Can I use MySQL to store pictures as part of a record? >| Should I just try to store the name of the picture? >Yep but it depends on the size of the pictures. Let me describe a scenario we have here in genomics research, which is extremely demanding in this respect. We have 125 million smallish images (each one is tens of KB, produced by gene sequencing machines). Currently we store these in tarfiles and index the images (the offset in the tar file) using an Oracle database. Each tarfile is around 1.5GB, containing tens of thousands of images. Thus, by using tarfiles we limit the number of files kept by the operating system (Tru64 Unix), which would be unmanageable otherwise. This method has various drawbacks, however, associated with keeping the database and tarfiles in sync. What we're contemplating now is keeping images in the database, and this re-design is estimated at 5-10TB of (Oracle) database. Does anyone have a comparable situation, in MySQL or any other realm? As well as Oracle we use MySQL heavily, partly because it's open source philosophy has distinct advantages in the public domain research context. Probably the closest comparison, at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the USA, is to store these images in multiple Sybase databases, keeping the size of each database down to 250GB. Our re-design is somewhat similar, but would use Oracle partitioned tables rather than multiple Sybase databases. As you can imagine this re-design is a major project for us, and comparative examples are potentially very valuable. Regards, Andy Bryant Oracle DBA and MySQL novice Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
