[Catalyst] Downloading BLOBs

[Steve Atkins]

On May 9, 2006, at 7:32 AM, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:

> Toby Corkindale <toby at ymogen.net> writes:
>> It's rather hacky, but I thought I'd submit it for your comments.
>
> Unless you've got something historical to support, don't use BLOBs in
> Pg.  Seriously, with real prepared statements, supported by DBD::Pg,
> the one remaining argument for using the LO interface (that all that
> data didn't have to be parsed, making things much faster) has gone the
> way of the dodo.

They're still useful for a few things - the ability to read
just part of the field is something that bytea doesn't have, for
instance. And being able to send the whole content out without
smashing the RAM postgresql is using is extremely useful.

That they're horrible to use doesn't mean there aren't places
they're still useful (though the places they're useful tend to be
exactly the same ones where you'd likely be just as happy
with filenames and metadata in the DB and files in a directory
tree outside it).

Cheers,
   Steve