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Maximum number of User-Defined fields?

donundeen

Hi,
I'm working on a MediaBin installation, where we find ourselves adding a large number of user-defined custom fields.

Now we're wondering just how far we can take this.

My question is: is there an upper limit to the number of user-defined fields that can be added to MediaBin, both in terms of technically (ie, at what point, if any, does mediabin “break down” ), and work-flow wise (what points of the application become simply unusable past a certain number of user-defined fields ) ?

In addition, any strategies for dealing with large numbers of user-defined fields would be most welcome.

thanks for your time.

Don Undeen
Information Architect,
Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Comments

lyman

There are a lot of things that affect the answer and so I am wary of giving a blanket okay! I have certainly seen 90 with no ill effects. The question is whether you intend to add 100 fields of which 10 will be populated for any given asset, or if you have a case in which all the fields will always be set.

Are all these fields strings? What is the expected behavior with respect to search?

So, no there is no blanket red flag but I would be happy to discuss further given more specifics!

Cheers,

Lyman Hurd

donundeen

sure.
We currently have 300+ user-defined fields. Many of these are in categories, or only visible to certain users.

Most of our images are tied to specific objects in our art database(s). Those images have many fields from the art database, copied into custom fields in mediabin. That's where a large percentage of the custom fields come from, and almost all images in our MediaBin installation get those fields.

In addition, some of our images are used in other applications, and we're using custom fields to store application-specific data for those images (rendering size, caption, credit, etc) information.

application development is an ongoing event here; with no forseeable upper limit on the number of applications, or the number of application-specific fields we may need to tie to a particular image in MediaBin.

Most are text fields, but we also have integers, floats, etc; whatever the application requires.

In terms of search, we may be searching on any of these custom fields, usually through the software API, using the field GUID. However, I'm wondering about the impact of searches in general as the number of fields rises.

What we are trying to determine, is whether or not we need an additional application/db to hold image-related metadata, or if MediaBin itself will be sufficient to our needs.

I'm just trying to get a sense of scale: is 300 a "large" number in terms of custom fields? how about 1000, 10000, 10^5, 10^6, etc?

What kind of performance/load/scaling testing has been done on the mediabin software (we have version 4.5.3 build 15), in terms of custom fields?

thanks for your time.

Don Undeen

lyman

I will share the thread with my search expert who should be back Monday, but generally searches on a small handful of individual fields should not be a problem.

There are some limits SQL places on search complexity. For thousands of fields are you anticipating any given search using 5 of them or 500?

Happy to continue the explorations offline.

Cheers,

Lyman Hurd