Re: Blobs: An alternate (complementary?) binary data proposal (Was: File IO...)

On Mon, 12 May 2008 07:40:44 +0200, Chris Prince <cprince@google.com>  
wrote:

> On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 9:22 PM, Aaron Boodman <aa@google.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Maciej Stachowiak
>>
>>  > Open question: can a File be stored in a SQL database? If
>>  > so, does the database store the data or a reference (such as a path  
>> or Mac
>>  > OS X Alias)?
>>
>>  There definitely needs to be a way to store Files locally. I don't
>>  have a strong opinion as to whether this should be in the database, or
>>  in DOMStorage, or in something new just for files.

Which seems to me to bring us back to the fileIO idea. In the meantime,  
Arve (who is one of the people who did a lot of the thinking behind it)  
has been thinking about useful ways that it can be sliced and diced,  
making some functionalities more readily available to general  
applications, although I am not sure where his thoughts are at the moment.

> A reference has the problem that the underlying file could be modified
> by an external program.  I think once you save data into the SQL
> database, you should be able to count on it staying constant, and
> valid.

Well, that depends on whether you are saving a copy(-on-write) or a  
reference. There are cases where it is actually useful to be able to  
operate on the file beside what the application does in the database,  
despite the increased complexity this brings... So maybe it should be  
possible to store both, and at least to consciously seperate the two as  
ideas in any proposal. They have (IMHO) slightly different use cases.

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
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Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 11:59:31 UTC