One solution might be concurrant storage of different versions of the same file in different blobs. Text-based formats (SGML, rtf, HTML, XHTML, plain text) can be stored in TEXT columns, while Binary formats (PDF?, GIF/PNG, Media) can be stored in BLOBs.
A nice side effect of this is being able to allow the choice of different requested formats of the same file easily; but the key benefit is the ability to simply index the plain text column of everything and do your searches by that.
Regards,
Japheth "J.C." Cleaver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 12:56 PM 1/7/2004, Steve Folly wrote:
Hi,
(disclaimer - this thread could easily go off topic; I'm interested only in the MySQL aspects of what follows...)
At work we are currently investigating ways of filing all our electronic documents.
There is commercial software that will do this I know, but I was wondering whether MySQL would be suitable for this type of thing.
The 'documents' could be literally any binary file. My idea would be to create a table with a blob column for the document itself, and document title, reference number, keywords, other meta-data. And a web-based front-end to search and serve documents.
Although the documents could be any file, the majority would be textual documents (Word documents, PDF, etc). How would one go about indexing such data, since full text searches operate on textual columns?
How to cope with columns exceeding the max packet length? Why is there a max_packet_length setting; surely this is low-level stuff that shouldn't affect query and result sizes?
Is storing the actual documents in the database such a good idea anyway? Perhaps store the file in a file system somwhere and just store the filename?
If anyone has experience in doing (or been dissuaded from doing) this kind of application your thoughts and comments would be appreciated. (If only to tell me "don't be so stupid, it'll never work" :)
Thanks.
-- Regards, Steve.
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