We have a need to store photos with our application. While I know I
can use a blob for this data type I'm looking for alternative
suggestions for folks who have similar applications.

We are a "fat client", Powerbuilder application, with AIX as the
Informix Server.

One concept I had kicked around was to store a path (or hyperlink)
within a table and physically store the photo outside the actual
Informix database as a standard JPG file. We do a lot of database
exports and imports and blobs don't behave all that well - nor are
they performant in this scenario.

One choice would be to use a NT server accessable to the clients and
have PowerBuilder access the NT system directly.

A second choice would be to store the JPG on an AIX file system. I'm
not sure if PowerBuilder could touch this directly, but I had thought
you could shell the program to FTP the file?

A third choice might be to have the client program call a database
stored procedure, passing the AIX path to the JPG, and have the stored
procedure return the blob. However, I'm not sure how I would "read"
the JPG into the Stored Procedure. How feasible do you think this is?

Thanks for your consideration.

Fred Prose
AZ Supreme Court

fprose@hotmail.com (Fred Prose) schrieb:

>We have a need to store photos with our application. While I know I
>can use a blob for this data type I'm looking for alternative
>suggestions for folks who have similar applications.

That sounds very familiar.

>One choice would be to use a NT server accessable to the clients and
>have PowerBuilder access the NT system directly.
>
>A second choice would be to store the JPG on an AIX file system. I'm
>not sure if PowerBuilder could touch this directly, but I had thought
>you could shell the program to FTP the file?

Out of the same considerations about BLOBs, we decided against them.
Our solution is to store the photos in a network folder that is
by default accessible to all our Windows clients. The network
share is mounted by all clients upon logon via a startup script,
so the path is always the same. The photos are stored with a file
name that contains the primary key (employee id in this case), so
it is easy to identify the file name from within the application.

It doesn't really matter where you store your files, Windows server
or AIX server. If you use the latter, you need Samba on the AIX
machine or an NTFS client for Windows.

HTH, Richard

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Well, these day I've working with photos of students on my IDS 2000 on
Windows NT 4 and Power Builder 7.x.

You can store the images as blob data type in the database.
First you must to insert the row, and then, from power builder read
the archive which has the image (jpg, bmp, etc..) convert it to a blob
variable and then do the next sentence to store it:

blob lb_picture

......

UPDATEBLOB table_with_blob_column
set picture = :lb_picture
WHERE ....;

That's all!

I'm working with IDS 7.3x and IDS 2000 9.2x on Windows NT and W2000