The Size of Attachments in the Database

Metastorm

The information in this article applies to product: e-Work

Issue

• How does the size of an attachment after it's written to the e-Work database compare to its original size?

Resolution

• The e-Work web client sends attachments to the engine as a MIME-encoded (base64-encoded) string. The eworkTransaction component then converts this MIME-encoded string (in unicode) to a byte stream before writing it to the database as a BLOB (Oracle) or Image (SQL Server). The MIME encoding increases the attachment size by 33% and unicode then doubles that.