Women in Technology

Article:		Designing J2EE Applications for Real-Life Clustered Environments
Subject:		External Files - Shared Systems
Date:		2004-07-22 08:17:15
From:		msugar
In an environment where files and directories can be shared among several machines, I think it is OK to store files (for instance, files uploaded by users) in the file system instead of a database. Can you elaborate on this issue, giving us more options and criteria for choosing each one?

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• External Files - Shared Systems
  2004-07-22 09:52:42  AnilSharma [View]
  
  
  Most applications read information from such files in memory & don't go back to the file all the time. With that, the concern here is not that the external file is not shared across nodes. (If that was the issue, using a network file store kind of system would resolve the issue.)
  
  The problem is in notifying all nodes of cluster that their cache of file is invalid, and should be refreshed. To do that, you'll have to build your cluster-aware mechanism which surely isn't desirable. You shouldn't have to make your application more complex just because you want to be able to deploy it on cluster also.