In response to Csaba Nagy <nagy at ecircle-ag.com>:

> > Can you migrate your BLOBs to bytea?  My understanding is that there are
> > some pretty big roadblocks to replicating BLOBs.
> 
> Well, the problem is that we store some media files into the DB, and
> don't want to load them all in memory, our code streams them. If the
> bytea can be streamed, it's OK... but I think it is just loaded into
> memory (we're using Java here). We do use bytea where the size of the
> data is relatively small, but for the image/video/other media we can't
> set the limit under a few MB... and I'm not sure if the business
> requirements aren't/won't be asking for 100s of MBs. That doesn't sound
> like reasonable for loading in memory through JDBC... though I have to
> check the JDBC docs, it might be able to stream the bytea, I just doubt
> that.

Seems to me that the better improvement would be to add streaming capability
to BYTEA.  I don't believe it exists at this time, but I could be wrong.

> I'm not sure what are the roadblocks here, but I guess a partial support
> which only kicks in when records are inserted/deleted would be enough
> for us, as we don't update the content itself. Or if we do, then never
> update the blob, but it will be replaced completely by a new one. Are
> the problems related to the fact that there's  no way to catch blob
> updates using triggers ?

I'm far from an expert on this.  If you're interested in the details,
someone else will have to answer.  But I think your comment is correct.

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.