As the originator of this thread I thought I'd throw in my two cents again. I use the technique of storing filenames in the database for 1 particularly good reason. The files must be accessible outside of the database application as well, plus as mentioned earlier if database gets bonkered you're access to the files is not impaired. In this application I store 250000 + growing small to large files (1.5k - 25 meg) and there in all kinds of different directories. The database application when creating the tables involved opens up theses files, extracts key information that can be used in other tables and queries to then provide a method of finding a file with particular parameters.
The other application, related sortof, also contains a few hundred thousand files, but these ones are a small gif image and I keep them all in a single folder. The disk storage space is wasteful as the actual file size might be 1400 bytes and the disk storage allocated is close to twice that. As was also mentioned previously when you try to open up an explorer window on such a folder it will grind and grind for several minutes before giving you a listing. My issue was whether to use a blob to store the images somehow or some other massive streaming mechanism. The image folder is large, over 800 megs and grows by 2 to 5 megs a week. As for accessing the files, I've never really noticed a problem if I dont use explorer and just try to access a file directly via my application. I do hope to convert the massive image repository into a database then I'll be able to do some comparisons to access times. ----------------------------------------------------- Home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/delphi-en/ To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/delphi-en/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
