Document Storage inside DB?

Has anyone got any experience or opinions about the
pros/cons of storing Office Type Documents inside an
image field in the database as opposed to storing a URL
pointer to the file in the filesystem?
Assuming there will be several GB of documents Im
thinking it would be better to keep these out of the
database.
AdamA common approach is to :-
Store the documents on a file server
Store a pointer to the Documents in the DB (to aid searching)
HTH
Ryan Waight, MCDBA, MCSE
"Adam" <atoth@.msdnspam.com> wrote in message
news:07ab01c3b4d3$2e07d430$a501280a@.phx.gbl...
> Has anyone got any experience or opinions about the
> pros/cons of storing Office Type Documents inside an
> image field in the database as opposed to storing a URL
> pointer to the file in the filesystem?
> Assuming there will be several GB of documents Im
> thinking it would be better to keep these out of the
> database.
> Adam
>|||Hi,
We are providing content management software that's using such an approach -
but we are using both DB and FileSystem as a storage for the documents. For
storing the documents inside the database, we use a "document-breaker" to
split the documents in meaningfull parts (e.g. the html documents are split
in tags and text).
The advantages we have with the documents inside the database:
- one single resource that contains the whole system
- easy backup
- depending on the document splitting, we can track and validate cross
document references
The advantages we have by also storing the documents in the file system:
- fast document access (knowing the ID, we don't need a query to the DB)
- fast search capability (using Windows Index Services)
By the way: we have productive systems using this approach with 2000+
documents.
Sven
"Adam" <atoth@.msdnspam.com> wrote in message
news:07ab01c3b4d3$2e07d430$a501280a@.phx.gbl...
> Has anyone got any experience or opinions about the
> pros/cons of storing Office Type Documents inside an
> image field in the database as opposed to storing a URL
> pointer to the file in the filesystem?
> Assuming there will be several GB of documents Im
> thinking it would be better to keep these out of the
> database.
> Adam
>|||I see two approaches that use a "file system" is this the
Windows "file system" that you are referring to and if
so... how do you insure the documents are not deleted?
>--Original Message--
>Has anyone got any experience or opinions about the
>pros/cons of storing Office Type Documents inside an
>image field in the database as opposed to storing a URL
>pointer to the file in the filesystem?
>Assuming there will be several GB of documents Im
>thinking it would be better to keep these out of the
>database.
>Adam
>.
>|||>--Original Message--
>I see two approaches that use a "file system" is this
the
>Windows "file system" that you are referring to and if
>so... how do you insure the documents are not deleted?
>
Yes - I do mean the Windows File System; in answer to
your question you could disallow Delete rights (assuming
NTFS) - Ive never tried it but the option is there.
Adam|||Thanks for the reply - do you think it would still work
well with say 100,000 documents?
Adam