What are the reasons to store documents into DBMS when using Alfresco CMS

Question

Hello guys!

I have interview for an internship with company that wants to implement document management system and they are considering on the first place open source solutions, their top choice being Alfresco, but decision is still not final, part of my work there would be to investigate is Alfresco the best solution.

What I have seen from project description, is that they would implement Alfresco with MySQL database, and not to use DBMS just for document metadata and indexing, but they actually want to store documents inside. By company profile, type of documents would be mostly PDF and .doc, not images.

I have researched a bit, and I have read all the topics here related to storing files into the database, not to duplicate a question. So from what I understand, storing BLOBS is generally not recomendable, and by the profile of the company and their legal obligations with archiving, I see they will have to store larger amount of docs.

I would like to be ready as much as I can for the interview and that is why I would like your opinion on these questions:

1. What will be your reasons for deciding to store documents into the DBMS, (especially having in mind that you are installing Alfresco, which stores files in the FS)???

2. Do you have any experiences with storing documents into the MySQL database specifically???

All the help is very much appreciated, I am really excited about interview and really want this internship, so this is one of things i really want to understand before!!

Thank you!!!!

Answer 1

From my experience with Alfresco, this is going to take a lot of customization of the Alfresco repository. I wouldn't go there myself. But if had to, I would answer your questions like this:

1. Reasons for storing documents into the DBMS instead of the file could be:

   • use of DBMS backup/security tools to copy/save/backup the documentation around, and this one is probably a good one:
   • access to these documents could be easier from other applications. I mean, if you're rewriting the storage service anyway, then you can rewrite it so that you store some of the metadata in the new database structure too. This would create some redundancy, but it would make the documents accessible from other systems without having to depend on Alfresco.

2. I have some experience with applications that use DBMS as storage - the application was used to store the incoming invoices, so that those could be approved, disputed or sent for payment or whatever. It had decent LAN performances, but the company had really good bandwidth. On the remote locations, though, it was a bit lagged as the documents were transfered back and forth.