[rt-users] Attachment storage

[Kenneth Marshall]

Hi Michael,

Like Jesse mentioned, 200MB-2GB is really not terribly large and
should be easily handled by most current DBs. Oracle, PostgreSQL,
and MySQL definitely can. One thing to consider is if your users
will be running a content search within the attachments. This will
require a full scan of the attachments table with the resultant
I/O. Make certain that your system can handle it or put measures
in place to prevent this. Alternatively, if your DB backend supports
full-text indexing this will be much less of a concern. Currently
the wiki has patches for Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Cheers,
Ken

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 06:16:51PM -0500, Michael Ellis wrote:
> I am considering attaching .wav files of the voicemail left on our helpdesk to rt tickets, but I'm worried about performance/stability if I start putting this amount of binary data in the system. I ran this thought by our local DB guy and he suggested that this might not be a problem if the database just contained pointers to files stored elsewhere.
> 
> I looked at the rt3.Attachments and it looks like the content is actually stored in the DB itself, but I'm a DB newbie.
> 
> So I suppose I have three questions: 
> 
> 1) Do I have it right that the attachments are stored in the DB itself?
> 2) If they are, could the DB handle, say, a thousand 200KB-2MB attachments per year (and if so for how long?)?
> 3) If they aren't, is there something else that might be a problem?
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Mike
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