What would use for versioned (large) text storage for the web app backend?

Question

Arguing with a friend of mine — I am advocating git/hg, he is advocating CLOBs MySQL. What is your preference?

Answer 1

I believe that totally and completely depends on your requirements. If my main requirement is to simply keep a versioned copy, so there is always a backup, then you can use GIT or CVS or Subversion, whatever you like. However, if I'm storing large documents for business users, that are frequently accessed and need to be searched then storing in a database is probably the best way. I'm not too familiar with MySQL, but in my Oracle experience there is a lot less guessing when I store large business documents in a BLOB column. That combined with the fact, Oracle can search text index those BLOB's for me, made it an attractive solution for the application I wrote for my place of business.

Answer 2

Depending on how large large is and how many of them you will have I think you will want to avoid storing them in any database. Version control and file systems are VERY good at storing large digital objects. Relational databases aren't.

Answer 3

You should follow the golden rule to organize your data storage depending on the intended queries you are going to make. So, it can be just plain files on a NAS, git or mercurial backends, a database or a custom solution. It depends on the way / frequency you will query / update them.

So given your lack of context, there is no way to choose.

Answer 4

Usually, databases are easier to interface with than a tool. You may want to look into using something like CouchDB or Apache Jackrabbit which does document versioning.