Short Comings of File Based Media Management

Application Note
Oracle interMedia
Feb. 27, 2004

File system based media specialty servers continue to be in use in managing media such as digital images. This brief note documents the shortcomings of that approach and the reasons why database management of the media makes more sense.

The use of file systems to manage digital media such as images and video has led to specialty servers for different kinds of data. This results in data isolation and high systems admin and management costs. It also leads to scalability problems, high training costs, and complex support problems.

File systems with their limited name space and indexing mechanisms notoriously perform poorly under high load. They are also not noted for running with high availability. They are also expensive to develop, do not make it easy to maintain integrity of the content because of their lack of support for synchronized updates, and in general cannot be easily and centrally manage.

File systems present several searching and scalability problems including:

• Manual file/directory naming
  • Risk: Inconsistent classification—lost/hard to find data
• Sequential file/directory searching
  • Risk: Waste time searching every directory and disk
• Limited search attributes
  • Risk: Waste time searching; can't find; must reinvent
• No back office integration
  • Risk: Limited searching, multiple copies of data, unsynchronized updates

Files are also problematic when it comes to security and data integrity.

• Limited sharing (requires file shares)
  • Risk: Content duplication, unsynchronized updates
• Inconsistent authentication (across servers) no audit trail, rollback, roles or views
  • Risk: Accidental file deletion/overwrites, malicious mischief
• No resource limits or record locking
  • Risk: Data can't be shared, multiple copies of files
• Business rules ignored
  • Risk: Business chaos

File system availability and performance do not approach the demands of 24 x 7 operations. With the Oracle database, there is:

• Load balancing.
• Failover.
• Replication—distributed synchronization.
• Flexible indexing.
• Dynamic query optimization.
• Partitioning.
• Online incremental backups.

With a file system the risks include limited scalability, availability, and reliability.

interMedia places intelligence around BLOBs which enables:

• Reuse and repurposing of media content through media attribute management.
• Faster application develpment for Java, C++ and 3GL - PL/SQL applications.
• Future investment through 3rd party plugins enabled through Oracle extensibility.

Storing media in the database with interMedia makes it easy to search and find any content, easy to develop new and extend existing media applications, easy to deploy with enterprise quality of service, and easy to manage the data.