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Putting in the DB would definitely save backup and recovery time, however now you're kind of locked into using the DB for storage so your platform choice for the documents is made unless you re-write your app code.

You are correct on the SAN usage not affecting ownership permissions on I, but now you do have the consideration of 2 backups.

There's also such a thing as network storage spaces I believe where all the files can be written into the mounted storage space and then the storage space can be saved as a blob. That's ow the FSIOP used to work.

Not sure if any of the new IASP or SAN storage for i works the same way. Someone else can comment on that.

Even the virtual optical stuff would work this way I think. Haven't had a need to use it much.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
RJS Software Systems Inc.
Where Information Meets Innovation
Document Management, Workflow, Report Delivery, Forms and Business Intelligence
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web Site: http://www.rjssoftware.com
Tel: (952) 736-5800
Fax: (952) 736-5801
Toll Free: (888) RJSSOFT


-----Original Message-----


message: 5
date: Sat, 18 May 2013 16:57:19 -0500
from: Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: massive document storage in the IFS - how to handle Mimix

I like the SAV benefit - IFS saves have the potential for being really
slow, since they seem to process each STMF by itself - lots of
start-stop when the STMFs are small.

On 5/17/2013 10:54 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:
The size of the file directly mirrors the size of the CLOB storage
(since the key data is measured in 100s of bytes vs. the CLOB measuring
in 100s of KB, the non-CLOB data is negligible). Note there are still
practical issues: the maximum size for a CLOB field is around 16MB; I
wouldn't store files larger than that in the database anyway. But for
anything smaller you're in good shape.

Generally speaking SAV performance is a lot faster. We actually had to
exclude the folders containing millions of files just to get backups to
complete. Saving a single 4GB file is much more efficient than saving a
million 4KB files.

Note that in order to use CLOBs you need commitment control which means
you have to journal the files. In most applications, the journals are
not useful so you can just delete the receivers as they roll over.

Joe

Joe, have you seen any differences in the amount of storage each record takes?

I can understand the benefits you see with access, and such. Any differences with saves, other than SAVSECDTA?

--
Bryan


On May 17, 2013, at 9:34 PM, Joe Pluta <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just got done dealing with this issue. I had two completely different
systems using the IFS for XML document storage (one for order
management, the other for EDI). It turns out that the IFS in particular
and the IBM i in general really aren't set up for handling millions of
documents.

Two issues. First is that any directory over 16000 entries begins to
fail on most QShell or PASE commands, although the native commands such
as MOV and DEL still work. But that does you no good when you want to
JAR up a directory with 150,000 files. Seconds, user profiles don't
like owning millions of objects. They just don't. They get bigger and
bigger and bigger and eventually your SAVSECDTA starts taking hours.
Not exactly the best situation.

So what I did is move everything back to the database. I use CLOBs and
store everything in a file. That allows me to easily manage the data
using traditional keys rather than crazy nested directory structures and
archival is as simple as copying records from one file to another. It's
a beautiful thing. As I said, I'm using it for XML but it's just as
applicable to PDFs or indeed any other stream file.

TIP: For XML you can use the XML data type rather than BLOB or CLOB. It
checks that the data is well formed and hopefully some day will also
allow PureXML querying like it does in DB2 LUW.

Joe
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------------------------------

message: 6
date: Sat, 18 May 2013 17:20:34 -0500
from: Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: massive document storage in the IFS - how to handle Mimix

Yeah, as I recall, matters of ownership don't apply the same way to
objects on a SAN. Is that right - it's been awhile since I had to think
about it. If so, it takes care of exceeding the number of entries in a
user profile, therefore, solves several problems, methinks.

Just trying to explain more for those who've not had to face this yet!

Vern

On 5/18/2013 11:27 AM, Richard Schoen wrote:
I would imagine now you would start managing large database file backups vs IFS backups.

Now what does your nightly DB backup window look like ?

It's interesting that one of the strengths and great weaknesses of tools like MS Sharepoint is that they store all documents in the database.

Larger DB backup, less file backup or larger file backup less DB backup. I suppose either has merits.

In the case of Sharepoint there are 3rd party apps that allow the files to be stripped from the DBs back to the file system.

Personally rather than starting to dump blobs into the database, I would look at alternate object management methods on the IFS. We had one customer who was creating a new profile each month to mirror the year/month that docs were stored.

Or an better answer is probably to move the file objects to a SAN or NAS storage device.

Interestingly there's already a project on the docket at the customer Joel was talking about to move the docs to SAN. They just haven't done it yet.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
RJS Software Systems Inc.
Where Information Meets Innovation
Document Management, Workflow, Report Delivery, Forms and Business Intelligence
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web Site: http://www.rjssoftware.com
Tel: (952) 736-5800
Fax: (952) 736-5801
Toll Free: (888) RJSSOFT




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