Re: Blob in Access

My first use of BLOBs in Access was with a(n Informix) server back end, and
remote users... the server was capable of storing all the pictures, users
could retrieve them, and they were "safer" in the server DB than if the
files had just been stored in a folder on that server machine.

Depending on the number/size of files to be stored in BLOBs in a Jet or
ACCDB multiuser environment, you may be better off storing them in a
conveniently-accessible folder outside the DB, or as BLOBs within -- that's
a developer decision that should be based on analyis of your own application
environment. If I just had a "few" documents, I'd probably say not having
to cross-check your addresses and actual files would make it worthwhile to
store in the shared back-end as BLOBs, but with "many" documents, increasing
the size of the back-end might well be a problem if you did not store the
files "externally" to your DB.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP


"(PeteCresswell)" <x@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:52o3t394g19k8o5p631rk75cd2sgv27nsi@xxxxxxxxxx
Per Larry Linson:
As Wayne said, a Memo Field will work; so will an OLE field. There's an
example of using a BLOB in Access in the Imaging Examples you'll find at
http://accdevel.tripod.com -- note those examples and article have not yet
been updated for Access 2007.

For reasons I can't recall, the last few times I had to track
various kinds of documents via a JET back end, I elected to store
only the DOS path addresses of the documents and keep them in a
dedicated folder.

Obvious downside of that is data integrity - we'll never know if
a doc goes missing until we try to open it.

But it seems to me like there were some fairly serious downsides
to storing, for instance, a mix of MS WORD, Excel, and PDF docs
within the DB. Performance is what comes to mind first, but I
can't really recall.

Anybody have an opinion on the merits of the two approaches?

Same two approaches, but in an SQL Server back end?
--
PeteCresswell


.

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