Re: [Gnumed-devel] doc_med , txt blob

[Ian Haywood]

James Busser wrote:
> Does GNUmed have --- or is it in future intended to have --- a search
> process that, based on start of file markers inside objects, can
> easily determine a method to do e.g. boolean searches inside the
> object(s), facilitated by some kind of re-usable open source plug-in?
>
>
I think the answer is: yes that's possible, but not desirable.

I'm not sure what the end-user use would be for searching, say, all the
JPEG images, would be. Searches are
generally around clinical meta-data (all MRIs of the brain, for example)
irrespective of what format
they are actually stored in, the meta-data is elsewhere in doc_med and
doc_obj.

Conceptually, if you want to search 'inside' a blob, then it isn't
really a blob anymore, and you
would need to decompose the data and store it in a different table,
broken up into it's logical components. This is not just SQL design
purism: it's the only way to do the search in reasonable time.

Ian