At 2:05 +0200 on 22/1/99, Fabrice Scemama wrote:
> I'd rather not split text messages in 8k parts!
> That's what BLOBS were designed for
Just to give you a few off points on BLOBs:
(1) They are not dumped with pg_dump, and you have to design your own
backup procedure for them, which you will be able to integrate later
with a dumped database.
(2) You can't display them in a casual psql query. I usually use psql
when I want to check something in my database. Storing the text in
split records would allow you to view the content in psql.
(3) Sometimes one needs to delete some data which was entered incorrectly
or as a result of a buggy implementation. If you want to delete a
large object you have to write a program. If you want to delete a
bunch of split text records, you only have to enter psql and issue
a DELETE statement in SQL.
(4) You can't search on large objects. Not even an unindexed search.
You have to retrieve every large object, and perform the search in
the front end. If you had it in split text records, you would be
able to search with LIKE or regexp.
Attachments are a different story. All of the above applies when we are
dealing with text processing. If the content is something other than text,
you don't need to search it, there is no point in viewing it in PSQL
because you need a proper viewer anyway, etc.
So if you want to treat your attachments as binary objects, binary objects
they should be.
Herouth
--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma