[ZODB-Dev] RelStorage and BLOBs

[Shane Hathaway]

David Durham, Jr. wrote:
> My questions is whether or not RelStorage supports BLOBs.  My
> situation is that I have a Plone site with user uploaded images and
> other files, that should presumably be stored as BLOBs with
> RelStorage.  I'm open to placing BLOBs outside of RelStorage if that's
> reasonably accomplished.

I think an NFS mount is still a better place for BLOBs than a relational 
database.  If we put BLOBs in a relational database, we'd have to 
carefully dance with inter-thread connections and simulated file handles 
that may stay open for a long time.  With NFS those concerns are already 
taken care of.

The normal way to set up BLOB storage in zope.conf is to create a 
<blobstorage> wrapper around a storage configuration.  That might just 
work with RelStorage, but I haven't tried it yet.

> The whole point of using RelStorage, for me, is reliability since I
> can use Oracle features to improve failure scenarios.  I realize that
> Zope sells a replication product, but I will not be able to obtain
> funding for this.  I'm also curious if something like ZeoRAID would be
> more appropriate for my usage scenario.

Well, I think RelStorage is up to the task, though the capability has 
not yet been proven.

Shane