Possible Uses of Magma

[Chris Muller]

Hi Daniel,
 
> ...
> When a call comes in or is made, the system makes an entry in this
> table and stores an MP3 file in a directory of the system. What I was
> wondering if it would be applicable and make sense, is to store all
> this information in a Magma database. Meaning, store the call meta
> information as well as the actual audio content. At first, I don't
> think there would be a problem. However, I was looking at the current
> system and they have approximately 200GB of audio content stored in
> over 100,000 files (in a period of 6 months).
> 
> As additional requirements, the system should allow for the "easy"
> search of call records by either date, agent, or phone number. Also,
> the actual call "object" should be stored in the customer profile so
> that when reviewing the customer record, historical call recordings
> can be pulled.
> ...

I'm glad you brought this up because I've contemplated this very question
before.  While Magma's ability to build and provide access to an arbitrarily
large object model includes large-and-flat collections of objects, it does not
include large streams of bytes.  This severely limits Magma's ability to work
with large multimedia files.

While you could, theoretically, commit and retrieve up to a 16-meg byte object,
it was never really intended to do "files" like this.  A streaming protocol
directly to the Magma server would be needed, i.e., something that could
nextPut: bytes chunk-by-chunk *during the call* rather than requiring the
client to buffer the whole thing and dump it all at once on the network to the
server as soon as you hung up..

> However, I was looking at the current
> system and they have approximately 200GB of audio content stored in
> over 100,000 files (in a period of 6 months).

Squeaks maximum file-size addressability is currently 2GB I think.  So we see
here that any potential implementation to support this would need to keep each
file separate, rather than embedding it into the objects file (which contains
the serialized bytes for every object in the database).

Perhaps Magma could emulate a "file-system" and provide access to certain
objects as files too?  i.e., what if the repository could be seen as a "drive"
and you could create "directories" and save arbitrary files in them.  The VTOC
tree would be kept in the system-area of the repository..

On the other hand, I am hard-pressed to believe you would want to use this over
the (surely faster) standard file-system provided by the OS..  I could add in a
bunch of code to support this and then it might end up not meeting your needs
exactly.  For example, perhaps the mp3 files would need to be accessible by
another application in the company?  So it would be accessing the files inside
the directory where the Magma database resides, which could cause contention..

So from that argument, it seems appropriate for each application to set up
their own location in the real file-system and write their program to access
the files from their own application based and referenced by location-objects
from their own app..

I hope others on list will share comments..

 - Chris