DB API

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <84pg9v$rda$1 at news1.xs4all.nl>,
Boudewijn Rempt <boud at rempt.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>Aahz Maruch <aahz at netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>> Mind expanding on this?  Are you asserting it's also a Bad Idea to slurp
>> multi-megabyte BLObs to a client?
>
>Well, what databases are good at, is picking one thing out of many.
>If you use a database as a flat file, and then do the picking of one
>out of many you've essentially written a distributed database. I've
>never used blobs myself - I know they can be useful, even necessary,
>but until now I've just stored an url in the database, and put the blobs
>behind a http server. That way, the database doesn't have to work so
>hard, and it becomes easy to distribute the load over two machines.

Oh, okay.  Let's suppose, for example, that you have a customer
database, and the client wants to view the entire order history for a
customer.  Would you say that it's inappropriate for the database to
return thousands of rows for an active customer?

Similarly, suppose you have millions of BLObs that change regularly.
How would you organize them on an HTTP server?  Incidentally, HTTP is
*not* an efficient transmission mechanism (less true if you're using
HTTP 1.1).
--
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