Saving Scanned Document In DB

[mkontou]

Hello all,
Any suggestions and ideas will be much appreciated.

Our Human Resource Department is scanning and saving a huge number of documents within a document management system (Not written in progress). We are facing many problems with this 'system' and also our systems, written in Progress with Progress DB 9.1D, need to access these documents.

We are desperate to find a way or a system or a tool written with Progress (so we can adjust it to our needs) to scan and store these documents in a Progress database. We need them compressed otherwise we will be running out of hard disk on our server every couble of weeks.

p.s. RAW DATA Format was tried but take to much space. We are using RAW DATA format to store only employees photos in our database.

ANY IDEAS????? ANYONE??? PLEASE!!!!!

Michel

 

[joey.jeremiah]

in openedge 10 you can use blobs

before that you would need to break them into smaller chunks
and store them in raw fields

you can find examples in the knowledge base
for storing images in the database

it also makes pretty good sense creating a dedicated storage area
to control fragmentation and scattering, physical location etc.


the best choice for compression, is www.zlib.net
you can find examples using zlib with pdfinclude

but, if you're trying to compress images
most image formats are already compressed

a few discs can probably store a few million document images
but you'll have to do you're own calculations


come to think of it, there are alot of advantages
storing files in the database

backups, googling data with word-indexes,
more effecient space utilization etc.

 

[mkontou]

Can you tell me what exactly blobs are in OpenEdge10? Is it worth, money wise, to purchase OpenEdge10 to get this tool instead of looking for complicated wayes and changing hard disks on our server?

 

[Kirmik]

BLOB = Binary Large OBject
In a nutshell it's a new field type which allows you to store a binary object in the database (e.g. Images, Documents etc.).
It's available in OE10 but as our business use 9.1D I'm not sure of the logistics involved in upgrading your current system. I'll leave the community experts to fill you in on that part

 

[gcampbell]

If you develop your application correctly it won't matter about the BLOB when you do go to OE10. You would just need to change two points ... the import and the export mechanism for the BLOB. In V9 the BLOB will be stored across multiple rows whereas the BLOB in OE10 is stored in a single row.

A simple table in v9 would look like:

DocId - a unique object identifier
DocSeq - each seq # would represent a 32K chunk of the file
DocRawData - the 32K worth of document data

Whereas a simple table in OE10 would look like.

DocId - a unique object indentifier
DocBlob - the binary (or text) document data

If you plan to start in V9 and migrate to OE10 it may be wortwhile to add an DocVer field to the Simple V9 table. Then in the future you could just add a Blob field to the V9 version. That way you could retain your old data and add new data. Therefore the resulting file in OE10 would look like.

DocId
DocSeq
DocVer
DocRawData
DocBlob

So the V9 loaded documents would use DocID, DocSeq, and DocRawData whereas the OE10 loaded documents would only use DocID and DocBlob.

Just a thought .....

Later,
Gordon

 

[joey.jeremiah]

you can write a few simple procedures to
encapsulate similar functionality to blobs

there are other significant improvements in oe10
like type ii storage areas etc.

but only you can tell if it's worth upgrading


i'll be writing something similar next month
if you're interested i'll be happy to share notes

by the way, there are progress archiving solutions out there
though i can't remember their names right now

 

[mkontou]

I am more than interested. Wheteher I figure out what to do by then or not, still I would like very much if you would ahre your experience. Thank you all.

 

[Techenzyme]

Requirement

Hello,

TechEnzyme is an East coast based IT products, services, research and CONSULTING company. Fulfillment is our specialization. We have many talented IT resources in almost all different skillsets......

We have the following requirement in Florida.Here are the Details:
Progress developer (2 positions)
Progress 4GL language development.
Familiarity with Progress database is plus.
Familiarity of healthcare terminology and processes are plus.
Familiarity with C#, .NET, Java.

We are looking for ideal resoures for this requirement.Please send the matching resumes to iswaria@techenzyme.com

Thanks and BestRegards,
Iswaria Pillai
TechEnzyme, Inc
www.TechEnzyme.Com