From: Thees Peereboom 

Geo,

Your arguments are good ones, just like all the arguments from DBA's,
systemmanagers, CIO's, etc. whom I discuss these matters with.

Unfortunately it always ends up that some day the pointers appear broken,
mostly because of some completely legitimate reason.

- Thees Peereboom

On Thu, 26 Dec 2002 07:31:44 -0500, "Geo."  wrote:

>This person who you are worried will move the files, would need to have
>delete access to the files. If this same person has delete access to the db
>then aren't you afraid they will mess with that as well? I agree it is
>possible to break the setup by moving the files but it's also possible to
>fix the system by moving them back or running a query to fix the pointers.
>
>I do understand how storing in the database simplifies the security and
>maintenance aspects, but that's only a problem for the initial setup, once
>it's done it's done and the filesystem security is at least as flexible as
>db security, no?
>
>There are other advantages to storing just pointers, if the load becomes too
>much or you need more disk space or some other physical limitation of the
>machine the pointers can quickly be changed to point to the files on a
>second server. Another advantage is if someone deletes a recording, you
>could just restore that one recording from the backup tape, you can't
>restore anything if it's stored in the database because that requires
>restoring the database and you then lose all transactions since the backup
>was made.
>
>Geo.
>
>"Thees Peereboom"  wrote in message
>news:3hql0v8qpgoq0gqsvdm9ina5e36pjmohd6{at}4ax.com...
>> Geo,
>>
>> In general I dislike storing pointers to files in the filesystem. Not
>> because it won't work, but in general because there will always be
>> somebody or something that moves the actual files to another location,
>> change the securitysettings on this specific directory (so that the
>> database-user no longer have access) or whatever. The result is that
>> the stored pointers become useless.
>>
>> - Thees Peereboom
>

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