I'm creating a filesystem and I think I'll be storing files in a DB (http://sietch.net/ViewNewsItem.aspx?NewsItemID=124 and http://blog.druva.com/2009/01/25/file-systems-vs-databases/ seem to indicate it's a good idea).
Since it's a filesystem, I'll need A LOT of I/O and REALLY fast. If I'm hosting on EC2, will Amazon SimpleDB be a decent solution for this?
SimpleDB has a maximum record size of a 1,000 BYTES so it is VERY poorly suited to storing files/blobs (unless they are tiny).
It is fairly common for people to use SimpleDB to index files and then to store the files in S3 which is much better suited for storing large objects.
SimpleDB (and recent DynamoDB) aren't suited to store files. Why don't you just make the versioning control on one of them, indexing files stored on S3?
You don't need to override the files on S3, as you can name them whatever you want and get the original name (and other info) from the database. You can even, for text files, for example, have a preview or the begining of the file on the DB or, for images, have a thumbnail on S3 and also get this info from the DB, so when users list the files they get only the thumbnail and, if they want, they download the full-size file.
Take a look at http://aws.amazon.com/en/dynamodb/faqs/#When_should_I_use_Amazon_DynamoDB_vs_Amazon_S3 and http://aws.amazon.com/en/running_databases/
Related
I'm building a web app that need to store some resources, including but not limited to articles, pictures and videos. My question here is how videos (mp4/ogg) are stored on web server? just as bare file or as binaries in relational or nosql db?
The question to BLOB data almost always comes down to "don't BLOB data". There are very few times that make more sense to write a database connector for your data then to just keep it on disk.
The general trend is to use an established service that employs good design patterns, such as Paperclip for ruby, and tailor it to your needs.
Using an external storage service is also a good idea, for example Amazon S3 will store all of your data for pennies on the dollar per gigabyte, and they'll do an excellent job of it.
If you do decide to cook up your own server that handles data internally, might I recommend digital ocean? I have been very happy with the SSD servers I have setup there (which are super fast).
For video you will almost certainly need a webserver that is capable of streaming the file. I think Nginx has this feature.
I think you need to elaborate a bit about the use case you wish to implement for this app. Only then you can have precise answer.
And to to help out with that, here are some questions you need to ponder:
1- You said you wanted to store videos, what are your requirements beyond storage?
2- do you wish for example to offer access to third party users to these videos and search with keywords?
3- If yes, what kind of information is available about the videos? what is the expected average size of these files?
Many database engines offer the possibility of storing big binary files, but that comes with an impact on performance. That's why most of the storage systems that deal with big files, store the files themselves on the disk and any related metadata (file name, last updated, associated keywords, etc.) are stored in the database. That makes for a scalable system.
I'll edit this answer, if you find it useful and have further related-questions.
An unlimited file storage is difficult to setup without AWS S3. S3 is cheap and scalable solution but expensive to use without proper caching, so we have Nginx S3 proxy that works well: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44749584/290338
I want to save an image as a base64 string as part of a model in Rails.
Does anyone have advice for the migration file?
I assume that simply setting a type of String would not be suitable, given that the size of the string is often large e.g. > 2MB.
You could use either text or binary instead of string in your migration if you want to overcome the size limitation.
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/ConnectionAdapters/TableDefinition.html#method-i-column
The API documentation gives this example:
td.column(:picture, :binary, :limit => 2.megabytes)
# => picture BLOB(2097152)
The maximum size of TEXT or BLOB (binary) columns depends on your RDBMS (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL), available memory, and certain configuration settings. For instance, in MySQL, you should have a look at the max_allowed_packet option, which you can set to anything up to 1 GB.
Regarding storage with Paperclip:
Paperclip doesn't allow database storage out of the box, so you have to write some custom code for that. Google gives me this:
http://patshaughnessy.net/2009/5/29/paperclip-sample-app-part-3-saving-file-attachments-in-a-database-blob-column
It's outdated though, so I'm not sure if it's helpful.
More importantly:
Note that storing files in database is generally not recommended which is why Paperclip doesn't support it. Some reasons it's a bad idea:
When images are stored in DB, every image request requires a call to your Rails app and the database, which has a massive negative effect on performance. If you store images as files or on Amazon S3, your app will scale much better.
Your database becomes large very quickly, which makes it harder to backup your data.
Since different RDBMS have different rules for column size, column types, etc., migrating large columns to a different database (e.g. from MySQL to PostgreSQL) may involve difficulties.
So I hope you have a good reason to do it anyway.
I'm new to Rails, I wanted to make a website for uploading files: music, videos, pictures, text. What is a better way to store files? I've read about different methods: Database, as a file, Amazon S3?
There will be a lot of files around 1 kb to 20Mb each.
Thanks!
Storing files in a database is not bad, per se. It depends on the kind of database.
Storing files in a relational database is not view as a good practice by the reasons explained by bassneck.
But there are other kind databases that are specifically designed to store any kind of data, in a non-relational way, for example files of any kind. The answer of Dhruva highlight that, MongoDB is pretty good and its support for storing files using GridFS is awesome.
GridFS is very good, for example it can stream only parts of a file, pretty useful for video.
In your specific case – many small files of many kinds of data – GridFS is an real option. I use Heroku & mongohq.com and they work like a charm.
I don't think there is a right answer for that. I use heroku, so my only option is Amazon S3 (which has free quotas for the first year) and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I use carrierwave gem for uploading files and it's really easy to use. I really prefer it over Paperclip.
If your hosting provides a lot of space and bandwidth then you could give it a try.
But for the database, I really don't like the idea of storing files in it.
Updated
Reading a filename from the table should be faster than reading the file itself. The bigger the DB, the longer it will take to make a backup. And if you take heroku for example, you only get 20gb for a shared db. That's not much if you're gonna store 10-20mb files in there. Moving project to another hoster might be easier if you store files in the DB. But if you use an external service (such as S3), there would be no difference for you.
Amazon S3 integration on Heroku is relatively easy to setup and get working with the paperclip gem. Heroku has some documentation on how to get this up and running.
Take a look at their documentation and see if this is the kind of thing your looking for.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3
I will suggest you to also check out & consider MongoDB GridFS - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/GridFS+Specification. My experience with GridFS has been good. I cannot give you a comparative analysis with the other options, however I would like to know the same.
I would recommend you use amazon s3 to store your files. It is the best.
I want a user to upload multiple images (+ thumbs) and give a description about their pics.
What do i need to do to create this the ruby way?
Do i manually create the tables (and which are these) or what gem do i require?
I want to store the file physical on a path and store the link (+ attr. information) in the db (if it is the best solution).
I am open to any alternatives to seek my best solution! :-)
Look at paperclip. Other great solution for handling multiple images for an item is paperclippolymorph
I'm not sure if there is a "best" solution, whether or not you store the images in the database is a tradeoff. Storing images on the server's filesystem and keeping the file's path information in the database will keep your DB smaller, but it will also add one more folder/location that you need to keep backed up and can provide security problems (if the image storage folder is not properly secured, it can be easier for an attacker to pull images off of a filesystem than extract them out of a database).
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
Using Rails, is there a reason why I should store attachments (could be a file of any time), in the filesystem instead of in the database? The database seems simpler to me, no need to worry about filesystem paths, structure, etc., you just look in your blob field. But most people seem to use the filesystem that it leaves me guessing that there must be some benefits to doing so that I'm not getting, or some disadvantages to using the database for such storage. (In this case, I'm using postgres).
This is a pretty standard design question, and there isn't really a "one true answer".
The rule of thumb I typically follow is "data goes in databases, files go in files".
Some of the considerations to keep in mind:
If a file is stored in the database, how are you going to serve it out via http? Remember, you need to set the content type, filename, etc. If it's a file on the filesystem, the web server takes care of all that stuff for you. Very quickly and efficiently (perhaps even in kernel space), no interpreted code needed.
Files are typically big. Big databases are certainly viable, but they are slow and inconvenient to back up etc. Why make your database huge when you don't have to?
Much like 2., it's really easy to copy files to multiple machines. Say you're running a cluster, you can just periodically rsync the filesystem from your master machine to your slaves and use standard static http serving. Obviously databases can be clustered as well, it's just not necessarily as intuitive.
On the flip side of 3, if you're already clustering your database, then having to deal with clustered files in addition is administrative complexity. This would be a reason to consider storing files in the DB, I'd say.
Blob data in databases is typically opaque. You can't filter it, sort by it, or group by it. That lessens the value of storing it in the database.
On the flip side, databases understand concurrency. You can use your standard model of transaction isolation to ensure that two clients don't try to edit the same file at the same time. This might be nice. Not to say you couldn't use lockfiles, but now you've got two things to understand instead of one.
Accessibility. Files in a filesystem can be opened with regular tools. Vi, Photoshop, Word, whatever you need. This can be convenient. How are you gonna open that word document out of a blob field?
Permissions. Filesystems have permissions, and they can be a pain in the rear. Conversely, they might be useful to your application. Permissions will really bite you if you're taking advantage of 7, because it's almost guaranteed that your web server runs with different permissions than your applications.
Cacheing (from sarah mei below). This plays into the http question above on the client side (are you going to remember to set lifetimes correctly?). On the server side files on a filesystem are a very well-understood and optimized access pattern. Large blob fields may or may not be optimized well by your database, and you're almost guaranteed to have an additional network trip from the database to the web server as well.
In short, people tend to use filesystems for files because they support file-like idioms the best. There's no reason you have to do it though, and filesystems are becoming more and more like databases so it wouldn't surprise me at all to see a complete convergence eventually.
There's some good advice about using the filesystem for files, but here's something else to think about. If you are storing sensitive or secure files/attachments, using the DB really is the only way to go. I have built apps where the data can't be put out on a file. It has to be put into the DB for security reasons. You can't leave it in a file system for a user on the server/machine to look at or take with them without proper securty. Using a high-class DB like Oracle, you can lock that data down very tightly and ensure that only appropriate users have access to that data.
But the other points made are very valid. If you're simply doing things like avatar images or non-sensitive info, the filesystem is generally faster and more convenient for most plugin systems.
The DB is pretty easy to setup for sending files back; it's a little bit more work, but just a few minutes if you know what you're doing. So yes, the filesystem is the better way to go overall, IMO, but the DB is the only viable choice when security or sensitive data is a major concern.
I don't see what the problem with blobstores is. You can always reconstruct a file system store from it, e.g. by caching the stuff to the local web server while the system is being used.
But the authoritative store should always be the database. Which means you can deploy your application by tossing in the database and exporting the code from source control. Done.
And adding a web server is no issue at all.
Erik's answer is great. I will also add that if you want to do any caching, it's much easier and more straightforward to cache static files than to cache database contents.
If you use a plugin such as Paperclip, you don't have to worry about anything either. There's this thing called the filesystem, which is where files should go. Just because it is a bit harder doesn't mean you should put your files in the wrong place. And with paperclip (or other similar plugins) it isn't hard. So, gogo filesystem!
Unable to find an up-to-date answer to this question I have implemented an
database service for Active Storage available since Rails 5.2 that works just like any other Active Storage service, but stores file content in a special database column instead of a cloud service.
The implementation is based on a standard Rails Active Storage service, adding a migration with a new model: an extra table that stores blob contents in a binary field. The service creates and destroys records in this table as requested by Active Storage.
Therefore, this service, once installed, can be consumed via a standard Rails Active Storage API.
https://github.com/TitovDigital/activestorage-database-service
Please be aware of all pros and cons of using a database for storing files.
With the right database it will provide full ACID support and can wrap file storage and deletion into transactions. It is also much easier in DevOps as there is one less service to configure.
Large files or large traffic are the risky cases. Either will put an unnecessary strain on the app and database servers.