InterBase, Blobs and PDFs

Anon

I use PHP 4.0.5, InterBase 6.0.1 and Apache 1.3.20, with which I'm trying to create a database driven web site, where I store all documents and images in the database. I'm currently debugging the storing/fetching procedures and I have noticed that while images, text files or executables seem to work fine, PDF documents seem to become corrupted when opening them in the browser.
Any idea what causes this?

Anon

I noticed that some documents were "cut off", making much smaller files than the originals. I tried it then with a smaller PDF document (worked) and a larger executable (corrupted), which lead me to believe it has something to do with the Blob segment sizes in InterBase, but I really couldn't say for sure.

niyogi

It seems that your better off storing the actual files on the server and having your database records point to the locations instead.

But I could be wrong. On a side note, how do you like Interbase 6? I just got started using it alongside PHP. Any pointers and/or links to good resources?

-S

Anon

I have just started to use it, and having mostly used MySQL before this, I don't really have any thoughts about its usage yet. I like the trigger, transaction and prepare/execute features so far, however.
As for resources, I've mostly used a pretty random set of different ones; Borland's own documentation (http://www.borland.com/techpubs/interbase/), the Annotated PHP Manual entry (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.ibase.php), the PHP source code, as well as the little I've found on here and on Faqts (http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/index.phtml/fid/10).
So far I believe my problem lies in the Blob segmentation limit of 64KB, which I am currently looking into how to work with.

Anon

    
...That whenever I feel like I'm really stumped on an issue and asks for help on it, it won't last more than a few minutes (or an equivalent short period of time) before I figure it out myself. The following piece of code (stripped down to essentials) helped me achieve what I wanted:

if (!($lc_bh = ibase_blob_open($blob_id)))
{
return FALSE;
}
list ($blob["size"], $blob["segnum"], $blob["segsize"], $blob["stream"], $blob["isnull"]) = ibase_blob_info($blob_id);
for ($i = 0; $i < $blob["segnum"]; $i++)
{
$blob["data"] .= ibase_blob_get($lc_bh, $blob["segsize"]);
}