I am currently working on a Java web application in which we are making
use of the JDBC driver for Postgres 7.4.1. Part of our application
allows the administrators to manage a large number of small images,
most of them not exceeding 5KB. There is about a gigabyte of these
small files. We're currently storing the files on disk and the other
information about the file in the database (historical reasons that I
won't complain about here).
I recently discovered the Hibernate project and was pleasantly
surprised how simple it was to store an image in Postgres as a bytea
using Hibernate's BLOB support. I'm wondering if Postgres would have
any problem handling all of our files if we were to put them into
Postgres as bytea data. And how well would Postgres scale as the
number of files increased?
Our Java application and Postgres are currently running on the same
machine, a dual Xeon 2.6Ghz with 1GB of RAM. We are currently not
working this machine very hard at all.
Thanks,
-M@