Does BLOB cubes are stored in RAM or in DISK ?

Hello,

I have a lot of BLOB which purpose is just to to load an extract cube file exported few seconds before on the dataset folder on the server

So end user can retrieve that cube export withtout having to connect to the server.

⇒ Does files stored in BLOB cubes are also stored in RAM or only in DISK ?

Means If I have 500mo CSV file in a BLOB cube it will take approx 500 mo in memory ?

In that case we need to clear regularly our BLOB cubes to save RAM. If it's only in DISK, no matter!

thanks

julien

Answers

  • Samson Sunny
    Samson Sunny Employee, Community Captain
    25 Answers 100 Comments Third Anniversary 25 Likes

    Hi Julien,

    From B12.0, cubes can only be created in RAM. So this applies to BLOB cubes as well.

    Thanks,
    Samson.

  • Hi @Julien CARDON,

    indeed BLOB cubes are loaded in RAM, anyway, you can see a quite small file size on them since they contain just paths of related contents. Attached files stay on disk and are uploaded in memory when someone interacts with them through an upload/download action.

    Other than memory consumption the are other implications you should keep in mind in case our process involves the creation of many files. For instance, your backup will be heavier due to those files. Have you thought about alternative solutions like using Board Shared Storage (Z:\ folder) as extract path in order to allow users to access extracted files?

  • Hi Leone, Samson,

    ok so in short, for BLOB cubes only masterdata are in RAM, all files remains on the disk except when downloaded / uploaded so impact on RAM should be low even using big blob files

    I'm on premise so I don't know if Z drive is something we have.

    I'm not sure that our IT will allow shared folder in the server for all our users.

    But I agree using datareader + BLOB cubes just to retrieve cube extraction is for from being perfect.

    regards

    julien

  • Yes, Julien - that is correct. Z drive is shared Azure cloud storage for Cloud based customers. You can instead make a local share on the server.

    Here are some additional references in the Board manual. They allude to RAM usage but don't fully explain it.

    https://www.boardmanual.com/2021/summer/data-modeling/2_Database_design_functions/8_Procedures/creating-procedure.htm

    https://www.boardmanual.com/2021/summer/capsules/screens/2_Objects/Data-entry_and_ATO/Simple_data_entry/InfoCube_write-back.htm