Thoughts on BLOBs in SQLite

[jonathandlynch at gmail.com]

For Augmented Earth, the images are base 64 encoded. This is needed for transmitting. Also, I can store a variable number of images in a single blob cell, using a character outside of the base64 range as a delimiter between encoded images.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 23, 2017, at 12:48 PM, Glen Bojsza via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> My databases will be fixed in their content (basically they are going to be
> different test engines for students) so the images will not be edited nor
> changed.
> 
> I am thinking that this may help me avoid any future issues that may arise
> if different platforms have different directory structures and also for
> maintenance ... a single database file is easy to deliver and easy to
> delete.
> 
> So my next question would be does someone have a simple example stack in
> inserting an image and retrieving the image in a LC stack?
> 
> Should the image be encoded prior to inserting or is native format fine?
> 
> Glen
> 
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Bob Sneidar via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
>> Better is a relative term. Do you need to occasionally edit the images?
>> Will the database continue to grow over time? My instinct is to keep files
>> as files on the disk, because managing them is not dependent on access to a
>> database. However, having the images universally accessible in a multiuser
>> application is much easier if you store them in a database because then you
>> wouldn't have to deal with maintaining images on a users file system.
>> 
>> I keep the binary equivalent of blank PDF forms in a binary blob in mySQL.
>> This way I can create new PDF forms on the fly without much fuss. I do NOT
>> however, keep the FILLED forms in the database (although I've been tempted
>> to) because these will keep multiplying over the life of the application,
>> and I am worried about database bloat. Backups get larger and take longer,
>> and eventually this would pose a scalability problem if the app was used
>> extensively by a whole lot of people.
>> 
>> Bob S
>> 
>> 
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