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

On Tue, 13 May 2008, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On May 13, 2008, at 5:08 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> > 
> > (I suspect that if we are still relying on a thing called 'blob' 
> > because we still don't have real file system access with some sense of 
> > security by the time we want to hand around a Terabyte in a web 
> > application, that we will have seriously failed somewhere. Although it 
> > isn't impossible that we end up there).
> 
> I see no reason the Blob proposal couldn't handle uploading a Terabyte 
> of data. 2^53 > 10^4. Indeed, for data that large you really do want a 
> filesystem reference that you can hand directly to a network API so it 
> can be sent without having to load the whole thing into memory via 
> script.

Indeed. I should add that while many users aren't necessarily there yet, 
there are environments (e.g. within Google) where dealing with 
multi-terabyte files is a pretty regular occurance. We certainly have a 
vested interest in making sure that the Web APIs can handle this amount of 
data -- this is the kind of thing we'd be using now, if we could.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 20:51:34 UTC