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Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 05/18/06 01:12
KR (kraman@bastyr.edu) writes:
> One of our third-party software vendors is planning to implement BLOB
> in their database for storing certain documents. We are not too
> thrilled about it, since it can be a drain on our resources, but I
> would like to get the expert opinion out there on the pros and cons of
> implementing this.
The first question I need to ask: is there a requirement to store
these documents at all?
Asssuming that the answer is in the affirmative, there are two options:
1) Store it in the database.
2) Store it on disk, and only save the file path in the database.
The latter is usually easier to implement in the application, and
takes less toll in the database.
However, when you think of it, the first solution is much easier to
manage. What if there is a crash and you need to restore? If everything
is in the database, you know that what you restore is transactionally
consistent. If you need to restore database + file system, get a
consistent restore is much more difficult.
Another aspect is that file system is more prone to accidents, like
people deleting files by mistake.
> Also, the database is in Full recovery mode and we back up the
> transaction log every 15 minutes. We also do a process similar to log
> shipping. We have two servers to which these transaction logs are
> restored to periodically. What will the impact on the transaction logs
> due to changes to the BLOB fields.
And if you store the documents in the file system, how do you do
log shipping?
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se
Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx
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