From: Robert Klemme Date: 2009-06-04T07:10:07+09:00 Subject: Re: is ruby only usable for pictures not for documents ? On 03.06.2009 22:05, Ben Bleything wrote: > On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Herman Müller wrote: >> Normally when you try to develop professional solutions you have to >> store documents like contracts etc. and something else into the >> database. > > Well, you have to store them *somewhere*. I'd argue that the database > is not a very good fit. You can't query against a blob. A database gives you a few things which may be important for some projects - it is transactional, e.g. you can do safe updates in concurrency situations and you can make sure that a set of changes is done atomically. This helps keeping application data consistent. - you have all your application data in one place, - which is especially useful for backups; RDBMS usually come with some form of backup solution, some of those are even capable of doing hot backups, i.e. while the application is active. - professional databases come with a lot more features that can be important for a business (replication, security...). >> But it looks like, that RoR is only good for storing pictures, do >> sombody knows howt to store *.pdf, *.docs etc. into the database? Maybe >> with full-text-indexing? > > Generally it's better to store the files on the filesystem and paths > in the database. As for indexing, you'll need to devise a method to > extract meaningful data from your documents and store that data in the > database. That extraction and indexing part can be done by some databases for some document types (full text indexing, features for spatial data). Of course, you pay a price when you place documents in the database (license fees, no direct access to docs) but one should be aware of the options. Kind regards robert -- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/