We Talk Coding
………..Databases?
If you wanted to store video, audio, text, dates and numbers what type of database would best serve this purpose, and why?
Public Comments
- Well, you wouldn't necessarily store audio and video in a database. These would typically be stored in a file system. A database would store references to those audio/video files, but not the files themselves. Your best bet is to use an open-source database such as MySQL. It accomplishes all of the basic needs of a database and is robust enough to handle large and frequent transactions (e.g. reading from and updating the database). If you're planning a business, I would recommend you start out with something like MySQL and then if things improve and your business grows you can consider purchasing a large, enterprise level database such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.
- Video and Audio files while they can be stored in a database should be stored as files on the file system with pointers in the database pointing to the file. Depending on the number of users and the number of transactions per second (selects, inserts, updates, and deletes) that you expect to see at peak you have several choices. Your budget for the product will also dictate which solution you select. MySQL (www.mysql.com) has a free database product that can be used for smaller systems. Some people say that it can be used to support a large enterprise, but in my opinion it isn't ready for that yet. Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) has both a free system called SQL Server Express Edition as well as a large scale system SQL Server Standard Edition and SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Oracle (www.oracle.com) also has both a free system called Oracle 10g Express as well as a large scale system Oracle 10g Standard and Oracle 10g Enterprise. You can also look into DB2 (www.ibm.com) but this is typically only used for mainframe type applications. Both Microsoft SQL Server (Standard and Enterprise) and Oracle 10g (Standard and Enterprise) are enterprise ready database servers. They can both handle thousands of transactions per second and support very high end server hardware. If you need to store the audio and video files in the database then you will need a database which supports a large binary data type. Both Oracle and SQL Server do this. Oracle uses the BINARY data type for this support, while the SQL Server data type is called IMAGE (the new SQL 2005 release also includes a data type called VARBINARY(MAX) which should be used instead of the IMAGE data type). I don't konw enough of DB2 or MySQL to tell you if they support large binary data types. I would assume that they do. With your need to store large binary objects in the database the free versions of Oracle and SQL Server will not work for you as they both place limitations on the amount of data that you can store within the database.
