TABLE OF CONTENTS In daily life, you most commonly encounter streamed data in the form of audio or video files. Streamed files are normally very large, so clients access them in a continuous stream. Even a DVD video, which allows much more selective sampling of a film than is normally available in a standard video format, breaks up a film into scenes, each of which may be hundreds of megabytes in size. Audio files are no different, especially if they are recorded at a high sample rate to achieve the best possible quality. If you use the Record narration feature of PowerPoint to record notes for a presentation, you will be surprised at just how quickly your hard disk fills.
Even if we do not want to encourage users to send massive attachments to each other, the simple fact is that they do. Every holiday, a new variation on the electronic greeting card is made available somewhere on the Web, and it ends up being mailed millions of times to different users. In the days of green screen email, we had cards composed of video escape character sequences. The escape characters instructed the terminal to display a series of primitive graphic characters in the correct order to create a picture. With a lot of dedication and trial and error, people produced amazing effects, and the electronic card was born.
The internal structure of EDB databases is not very suitable for storing large attachments that clients access in a continual...
