[GLLUG] BLOBs in Databases

[Mike Szumlinski]

If you are building an application in which a filesystem is cumbersome to develop against, it is relatively easy to poll binary data out of a database and use it to do things.  In the small space it makes for simple portability.  When you start getting into really large storage environments (1PB+), I’m seeing a lot of enterprises actually move back to object storage, which is functionally just storing files in a database vs. a filesystem.  Amazon has done quite well with this in S3 and many of the other “cloud” services out there are driven by object storage backends, not filesystems.

Long story short - sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.  But when it does, it does.

-Mike


> On Feb 2, 2015, at 2:17 PM, Chick Tower <c.e.tower at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've been doing a little research into SQLite, and they have a storage class (they say it's slightly more general than a datatype) for binary large objects (BLOB).  You can store photo images, or I suppose even executables, in the database.  (I assume the same is true for other databases.)  My question is why?  You can't view an image with SQLite. How do you even get an image out of a database to view it?
> 
> Perhaps I'm wrong in the intended use of the BLOB storage class.  It says on the SQLite website "The value is a blob of data, stored exactly as it was input."  So maybe it's intended for something other than images, but, if so, what?  I still wonder how you extract a BLOB from a database in order to do anything with it.  Does anyone know what to do with BLOBs?
> -- 
> 
>                               Chick
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