[Zope] should files be stored in RDBs?

Charlie Fulton ccfulton@unity.ncsu.edu
Mon, 20 May 2002 14:56:23 -0400


I'm setting up a database to store data file for a scientific research
group.  I'm thinking of writing the data into a MySQL table rather than
storing them externally in the filesystem.  The files are generally small
but the number of them will grow quickly.

Are there opinions as to whether this is a good or bad idea?

I know there's overhead and a (severe?) throughput penalty, but I was
thinking this would be simple to manage (and back up) as well as being easy
to search.  The load on the server won't be much anyway.

Can collecting binary data in a web form and writing it to MySQL be done
totally in DTML?  I've found some past threads in the list dealing with this
kind of thing (and an old how-to) but there doesn't seem to be a consensus
on a "right" way to implement it.

Thanks,
Charlie