[ale] Question: Transparent document sharing over the Internet

[Chris Fowler]

The reason why I bring it up is because a few years back I wanted to
create a DB with all my MP3's and store them as BLOBs in MySQL.  A few
people on this list frowned about that idea an recommend the file route.

Obviously a webapp has to be created.  The files can be stored and
owned by the user that the webapp is running as.  And you do
not actually give the user a link to the physical file that is on the 
filesystem.  You use the webapp to feed them that file. 

There are _many_ ways this task can be accomplished.  

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 21:16 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> Chris Fowler wrote:
> > A few years back I brought this question up about MySQL.  A BLOB
> > was possible but there was a better solution.  Simply store the binaries
> > on disk.  In the DB store the filenames.  You app can then feed the data
> > to the remote or do whatever it needs to do. 
> 
> It's a whole lot easier to control access if the files are actually in 
> the db.  You want to be sure the process is atomic and that's easier if 
> you're dealing with database access and not database access AND 
> filesystem access.  It can be done, it's just easier.
>