Hi there,
Emiliano wrote:
> We didn't have time to discuss blob serving at the IRC meet last
> night, so I'll do it via the list.
Good, some comments...
> Serving page blobs from the database can be handled by mod_midgard
> too, but I suspect that it would get very memory consuming.
> AFAICT you would retrieve the file contents by an SQL query into
> memory and then serve it out to the client. I hope there's another
> way of doing this, but even if you can flush blobs directly to a
> temporary file (and then handling it as above) this is going to be a
> strain on the server (file creation and deletion is expensive).
> Imagine what would happen if the monster package gets popular :<.
> And there's the point of field size limitataions, too.
It isn't as bad as that. At least ODBC and most of the native database
interfaces have means for streaming the BLOB fields. The BLOB contents
are returned in a sequence of fixed-lenght packets to the database
client. I've thought about a separate blob table for Midgard 2.0 that
would be accessed using special streaming functions. Such blob contents
could be served directly by a simple content handler in mod_midgard.
The only problem with this is that then normal MySQL client API doesn't
support streaming the BLOB contents. In fact the communication buffers
used by MySQL are limited in size so although they the size is
configurable, you could run into troubles with large files. I'm not sure
if or how MyODBC handles this.
> Am I makeing too much of a point of this? I want use Midgard for a
> intranet site that has parts of it available only for specific groups
> (management for example) and there may be documents stored on the
> server that require confidentiality.
The method used by Midgard's web site for storing the attachments was
originally developed for the Stonesoft's intranet site, and has proved
quite simple and easy to use, although it has the problems you
mentioned.
> Last (but least, I think), serveing blobs from the FS iso the DB puts
> them outside the current packaging proposal.
Yep. The packaging is difficult enough with only a single data source.
Adding external files is possible but potentially erroneous.
Jukka
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