Importance is in the eye of the beholder…

 

Marcel Kratochvil recently wrote a paper on the relevance of FKs with respect to multimedia. This post is inspired by that paper, because it reminded me of a multimedia database project I worked on a few years ago, but it is not the central argument of his paper.

When retrieving large multimedia objects (Images, Audio, Video etc) from the database and sending them over the internet to a browser, the biggest impact on the user experience was the internet speed, especially since this was a few years ago. The database performance was for the most part irrelevant. As a result, the effect of bad execution plans was also largely irrelevant. So I might represent the loss of overall performance as a result of omitting FKs (or anything else that affects the optimizers decision making process) as follows.

ProcessingTime

In attempting to tune this system, you can bet that the majority of the effort was spent on the transit mechanism, rather than the DB performance.

  • Am I suggesting FKs are irrelevant? No.
  • Do I agree with Marcel’s paper? No.
  • Do I understand some of the points he is making? Yes.

Your frame of reference has a big impact on the importance you place on things.

It’s late. I’m going to bed. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

One thought on “Importance is in the eye of the beholder…”

  1. Tim, thanks for the comments. In a discussion as fiery as the one I am in, I appreciate honesty and attempts at looking at the point trying to be made. A goal of the paper is to attempt to change the world view on relational. I have been doing serious work on multimedia for the last 14yrs and I was once a core relationalist who only after using, developing, managing and coping with unstructured/multimedia data, slowly began to see a different view. A view which I am trying to get others to see in only one paper. So its going to take time, and I really only think it will be truly understood when more DBAs/Developers are forced into positions where they have to do serious work with Multimedia.

Comments are closed.