[UPHPU] Storing images in DB

[District Webmaster]

I still think storing binary data in the database can be a good idea,
even after reading the nifty article. While the artical made many good
points, it's absolutist approach is (as absolutist aproaches generally
are) an overly simplistic look at the problem. You can rarely trust any
opinion that says things should always or never be a certain way.

We have a system that requires certain files only be accessible at
certain dates. If we kept those files on the disk, and had them
available to the web server, they would always be available to anyone
who knew or could guess the the URL -- unless we wrote a seperate system
to either change the file attributes, or a seperate system to move files
in and out of the web root. All of these are fine to do, but it assumes,
that you have the ability to run php from a cron script -- which would
require you to have the cgi version of php installed, either as your
main installation or concurrently with the apache module version. All of
this is a lot more pain than just using "select file_name, file_data
from files_table where file_viewable_start_date >= CURDATE() and
file_viewable_end_date <= CURDATE()"

Understanding the possibilities helps you chose the right solution for
your particular problem. Beware those who will tell you a particular
programming methodology is always right or always wrong -- they have
likely not considered all possibilities.

Dave

>>> Ray Hunter <bigdog at venticon.com> 05/25/04 11:23 AM >>>
On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 10:58, Daniel Crookston wrote:
> An article on why this isn't necessarily a good idea:
> http://www.yapf.net/faq.php?cmd=100&itemid=22
> 
> > Have you considered storing the image in the database? This helps
with
> > data portability and some security issues. You would want a blob
field
> > to store an image.

Not to mention you can have forms of data corruption that i have seen in
the past. At one job we went down this road and it was extremely
painful. We had the image in various sizes in the database, however, it
turned out that by using php and converting on the fly was the simple
solution. One thing that we did add to the mix was a dedicated image
server that served up the images. We used a small web server to do that.

Also I would suggest looking at what file system type you have and which
would be the best for your set up. I tend to use reiserfs a lot for the
stability.

--
Ray



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