Plant Database
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So, I want to make an address book like database for all the plants I encounter. I am going to sort them in a list by scientific name and when I click on one of the names it will show a picture I took of the given specimen in a large picturebox next to the list. Then when I double click on the name of the plant, a new window will open showing multiple pictures of the plant along with categorical data similar to a contact entry (name, address, city, gender, etc). I am not sure how to go about doing this in terms of storing and accessing the picture files. I am not too familiar with SQL but I have seen some examples of address books using SQL servers on this site. My question is how will i store, call, and manage all the pictures of the given plants in an SQL server? Can you call up pictures as you do text data? Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
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So, I want to make an address book like database for all the plants I encounter. I am going to sort them in a list by scientific name and when I click on one of the names it will show a picture I took of the given specimen in a large picturebox next to the list. Then when I double click on the name of the plant, a new window will open showing multiple pictures of the plant along with categorical data similar to a contact entry (name, address, city, gender, etc). I am not sure how to go about doing this in terms of storing and accessing the picture files. I am not too familiar with SQL but I have seen some examples of address books using SQL servers on this site. My question is how will i store, call, and manage all the pictures of the given plants in an SQL server? Can you call up pictures as you do text data? Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
There are many ways to handle photos in SQL Server, so do a little research. Photos are usually treated as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) in database parlance, so try searching Google and MSDN, as well as the database forum on this site. The short answer is yes, you can use photos just like any other data, but there are efficient ways to do it and innefficient ways, as well. I'm not an expert on this, not even a beginner, but I have read a lot of discussion about this type of database, and I recommend that you do so before you spend too much time chasing butterflies. :)
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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So, I want to make an address book like database for all the plants I encounter. I am going to sort them in a list by scientific name and when I click on one of the names it will show a picture I took of the given specimen in a large picturebox next to the list. Then when I double click on the name of the plant, a new window will open showing multiple pictures of the plant along with categorical data similar to a contact entry (name, address, city, gender, etc). I am not sure how to go about doing this in terms of storing and accessing the picture files. I am not too familiar with SQL but I have seen some examples of address books using SQL servers on this site. My question is how will i store, call, and manage all the pictures of the given plants in an SQL server? Can you call up pictures as you do text data? Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
You have an even more fundamental question to answer before discussing the database and how to store your data. What is the client you are going to use, winforms/wpf or web/silverlight. This will be determined by your audience. If your project is a personal one then winforms may be the best solution. With SQL server you have a number of choices of how you store your data, you may want to store the actual file in the database or filestore (SQL 2008) or you may want to leave the file in the file system and store it's location in the database. If you are using the web this is critical as your database size will be DRAMATICALLY different and it will affect your hosting choices.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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So, I want to make an address book like database for all the plants I encounter. I am going to sort them in a list by scientific name and when I click on one of the names it will show a picture I took of the given specimen in a large picturebox next to the list. Then when I double click on the name of the plant, a new window will open showing multiple pictures of the plant along with categorical data similar to a contact entry (name, address, city, gender, etc). I am not sure how to go about doing this in terms of storing and accessing the picture files. I am not too familiar with SQL but I have seen some examples of address books using SQL servers on this site. My question is how will i store, call, and manage all the pictures of the given plants in an SQL server? Can you call up pictures as you do text data? Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
Personally, I prefer to store such files within the database.