Having made the first release of my family tree application its time to look to the future.
Once of the things that has been suggested to me is to store pictures of the people and their marriages in the database. I am using Postgres which seems to have more than one method of binary storage. For very large binary objects (the documentation implies things in the order of 1GB or more) then a separate large binary object is available refered to via a datatype called OID in the table which logically holds it. As far as I can see from the jdbc documentation this is mapped to the jdbctype BLOB. But it also has a type of bytea which seems to map through to the java type of byte[]. These seems much more appropriate for storing jpeg images (which is what I plan). In the ibatis wiki I noticed something that says you can get at binary data by making a result map with the result having an entry with the jdbctype="BLOB" in it. The only write up I could find about jdbc types does not really talk about the type as expressed in the ibatis xml - but it does say that there is a getBytes jdbc api (which is what bytea is mapped to). Can I just have a property in my java object which has a byte array (with the getter and setter methods) and use result maps to declare a property for this which maps on to the column in the database which is of type bytea. Do I need to do anything else? Specifically do I need to use the jdbctype attribute, and if I do what do I use for it? -- Alan Chandler http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk Open Source. It's the difference between trust and antitrust.
