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139

answers:

3

A friend has developed a very amazing blob store and I think it needs to be used, but I'm wondering whether people think such a thing has a market, and if programmers ever get to make these kinds of decisions. It has support for online backups using deltas and is much faster than anything I know of, it's undergone rigorous testing and being used in some very niche applications. I would think anyone with a binary file format would like to use it as an alternative. It has a C++ interface and has been adapted to .NET serialisation.

It absolutely blows SQL blob tables out of the water.

Thoughts?

Edit: It is better because:

  • It is very fast.
  • It is transactional, with a full recovery scan, so far better than flat files.
A: 

Thoughts? You haven't said how it is better... (or how it is better to a flat BLOB/database/file solution).

Also, regular .NET (binary) serialization isn't well-suited to long-term storage (in a database), since it is implementation-specific (and tied to the assemblies). For serialization, you might want to look at platform-independent solutions such as Google's protocol buffers (which has implementations for C++, java, C#, and others- including one of my own).

Marc Gravell
huh? databases can be used for short term storage. The .NET wrapper is just an example, we use our own solution for serialisation that caters for schema evolution.
Jesse Pepper
+1  A: 

There's a market, but not a massive one. There is also long-established competition, see BerkleyDB (which was an independently marketted product (company name: SleepyCat), but they were bought by Oracle a while back.

U62
A: 

Depending on the licensing and cost, I'd certainly look at it. I asked about something like this just a couple weeks ago, and ended up using an SQLite database file for the moment, which I suspect is less than optimal.

(And I run my own software development company, so I do make the purchasing decisions. :-) )

Head Geek
@Head Geek: Jesse and I work together (we run our company too!) - http://www.thinkbottomup.com.au/site/Products/SerialKiller - which we are productizing. Please excuse the web site as we are still getting marketing material together. If interested, email us via the address on the Contacts page.
Daniel Paull