6.29 Slick, low cost document storage and retrieval need not be an oxymoron

The problem: "We are initiating a project for the storage and retrieval of raster images. Due to budgetary constraints and other factors, we would like to have as low a cost solution as possible. We will have scanned images of documents containing text and graphics in ordinary PCX, TIFF etc formats and want to be able to retrieve them on demand to a Windows95 desktop. Any ideas?"

Neil Harvey supplied a great response as someone who has "been there done that" which I quote in whole:

My 0.2c worth of advice is to avoid storing the scanned images as BLOBs in some relational database. Instead, scan them and store them as serial numbers in a slashed sub directory structure. Store image number 0010132456.tif under a directory as follows:

\\IMAGESERVER\Images\00\10\13\24\56.tif

Each subdirectory will hold only 100 entries, and will be VERY swift to get to. The HP3000 can be used to maintain the serial number sequence. As for the index information, store this in the world's most robust and easy-to-use database called TurboImage. All you need to image-enable any application (existing, or new) is a single field (column) tagged onto the already indexed dataset record. It's not that difficult to do this, and now with Samba/iX, you can even store the images on the HP3000.

Glue the structured data and the images together at the client, using some DDE enabled viewer (VB?), and Reflection or MS92. The application can initiate the DDE commands to tell the image viewer to retrieve and display the image or function keys can be pre-programmed to do this. However you do it, you will gain hugely against paper handling/micro film base systems.

Don't get hung up about workflow, the main selling point of Document Image Handling packages. When everyone has near instant access to the scanned image, perceived workflow requirements simply vanish. Mostly, what people want to do when viewing an image is add a little something to the index record, and HP3000's are very good at allowing this to happen.

We have a customer with over 5 million images safely stored this way on a single NT server with raid, and securely indexed on the HP3000.