Can BLOBs hinder an MDBs performance? 1

[tdion]

I need to know this answer but I don't know where to look.

A friend of mine compresses BLOBs before he puts them in the MDB to improve performance. He says the BLOB field is fixed length and the MDB will bloat if any BLOB is too large (thus zipping them makes the field size smaller.) I don't know if that is true.

If a BLOB field is variable, and a new larger BLOB takes its place, won't the MDB fragment like a hard drive? I mean, wouldn't the BLOB be stuck somewhere far away from the other record data because there is no room for it?

I need to design the most effecient DB possible because I am dealing with over a million records. I have spreadsheets that need to be stored, and I need to know how to put them in most efficiently.

Thanks for reading my post!

 

[jrbarnett]

Hello

You are right in that Blob's (OLE object type fields) are not stored in the same manner as text or numeric fields, and by inserting spreadsheets or other external objects it will cause the size to bloat.
Could you not use a text field to store a full pathname of the file, and keep the actual files in a separate folder?
This would keep your database size down.

John