Storing files

[Christer Claesson]

Hello guys and girls. I'm working on page that will store alot of word, excell and pdf documents(maybe some more types) and I'm wondering if there is any best practice to handle the files storage? Perhaps some links on it(I've searched around some but have not found anything) Should I put them in a database as blobs? Or should I store them in a "normal" file structure and perhaps index them in a database? Does it exist an easy way to search contents in word files? Searching only on filenames wont be enough probably.(I saw an article here but I think it was mostly concentrated on spidering the web, would it work in word files and how costly is such a spider in performance and space usually) Thanks in advance Christer

[Mike Ellison]

Hi Christer. My humble opinion - unless you have a real good reason for putting the files in the database as blobs (database replication perhaps?) I would keep the files in a normal file structure and index them in the database. As for your Word question - I'm sorry, I don't have an answer to that. Does Google bring up any useful results?

[Christer Claesson]

Thanks for your advice, I think I will only index them in my database then. I have not found anything about Word yet, but if I find something interesting I will post it here. Might even make an article out of it.