Attachment storage

RT Users
1

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

2
  1. Do I have it right that the attachments are stored in the DB itself?
    Alas, they are.
  1. If they are, could the DB handle, say, a thousand 200KB-2MB attachments
    per year (and if so for how long?)?
    Depends on your rdbms. Oracle could it, not so sure about MySQL.

Alternatively, you could stash them on a network share or similar,
and give the path in a clickable custom field…

3

So I suppose I have three questions:

  1. Do I have it right that the attachments are stored in the DB itself?

Yes.

  1. If they are, could the DB handle, say, a thousand 200KB-2MB attachments per
    year (and if so for how long?)?

2 gigabytes of storage per year isn’t a whole heck of a lot to see a
database grow by in the 21st century.

All our corporate voicemail goes into a MySQL backed RT and we’re very
happy with it.

4

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,
KenOn 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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5

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

FWIW our voicemail system dumps all voicemail as WAV files into a
separate queue that is transcribed by the support staff. We’ve
probably got 7k messages in there now, no problems so far.

Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source
and other randomness