Hi @envkavita ,

I’m unaware of a way to change where the media library stores media items.  I think it always store them in the database.  I know with document management you can configure a repository to use database, ftp or shared folders if you utilize IFS on-premise.   I believe using IFS Managed Cloud environment you only have the option to use database as well.  

Storing 8 million images in the database is certainly feasible but you’d have to perform an analysis so you know how big your database would grow initially and what the growth rate would be over time.  Storing large quantities of documents or images in your database could impact your backup and restoration times significantly.  Performance may not be impacted as much because you may not be querying or viewing the images regularly.

An advantage to storing the documents in the database is IFS can build the search so you can find relevant information quickly.  Another benefit to storing documents in the database is they are backup and restored when you perform you normal backup of the database using RMAN and we believe they are more secure than using FTP or shared folders because we can use access groups in IFS instead of having to configure separate permission on the FTP or shared folders.

We did decided to use document management for most of our images and documents and we use shared folder repositories.  We have kept certain documents in the database such as HR documents so we could control access from within IFS for added security.

Regards,

William Klotz

Hi William thanks.

However, when going through the documentation i am a little confused with what is being written there.

“

The Media Archive is a container for media items used in IFS Applications. The user can configure storage of media items in a location outside the database. When archiving is enabled, a scheduled background job will scan the database for media items that has not been accessed for a user specified number of days and archive the media items. New or replaced media items will be archived to the active archive. Depending on customer preference, archiving can be done in Azure Blob Storage or Oracle File Storage.

Use Media Archives window to create a new archive record providing storage specific data. Test and set the new archive to Active. User can create any number of archives and one archive will be active at any given time. Archived media items can be accessed from all media archives even if they are not Active during the time of access.”

On one side it says that the media can be stored in archives (outside of database). Then it talks of media gets archived if not being accessed. Finally the last line of the second paragraph says “Archived media items can be accessed from all media archives even if they are not Active during the time of access”

Can we create this archive and store the media in Azure Blob Storage and still access them from the IFS Business Object?. Does it mean that it gets loaded in database and then gets passed on to this storage, however it is accessible from archive as well?

Please if anybody has used this help me out on this as we need to take a decision on configuring/not configuring this. 

Hi,

Can we create this archive and store the media in Azure Blob Storage and still access them from the IFS Business Object?. Does it mean that it gets loaded in database and then gets passed on to this storage, however it is accessible from archive as well?

Yes, you can still access archived media items. They will be fetched from Azure when they are needed. Media items are archived (moved to Azure) when they have not been used for a while (according to a setting).

A warning: Due to a but in Oracle 19c, the upload to Azure does not work. Oracle have released a patch but we have not yet tested it. It should work well on Oracle 12 though, as I remember it.

FYI, in IFS Cloud 21R2, there will be no need for this functionality anymore. We now have the option to keep media items in Azure, always (or you can still keep them in the database if you want to).

The drawback with the “old” solution you are looking into is that, even if the media items are archived, the data must first be loaded into the database. It’s not a good solution but we had to implement that as a bug fix in a short time, so we could not design a better solution.

If it is not very important that the images are kept in the Media Library I would advice you to keep them in Docman, since there we have the option to use external storage either on an FTP server or in a folder (local to the application server or on the network). Note: this is only supported if you have an on premise installation. Docman is a bit more complex (but you don’t need to use all features and it is not hard to upload and view an image in Docman) and you don't get the thumbnail support, but you will also get more features, like for example access control.

/Mathias