Indirect Fields

Indirect fields are byte fields that exist as real files within the file system. This field type is usually used when you are creating a database that is managing a collection of files on the server (like word processing files for instance). They can also be used when the 1 Gig limitation of fields is too small.

You may use indirect fields to point to your files anywhere on your file system or you may let Texis manage them under the database.

Since files may contain any amount of any kind of data indirect fields may be used to store arbitrarily large binary objects. These Binary Large OBjects are often called BLOBs in other RDBMSes.

However in Texis the indirect type is distinct from blob/blobz. While each indirect field is a separate external file, all of a table's blob/blobz fields are stored together in one .blb file adjacent to the .tbl file. Thus, indirect is better suited to externally-managed files, or data in which nearly every row's field value is very large. The blob (or compressed blobz, available in Texis Version 8 and later) type is better suited to data that may often be either large or small, or which Texis can manage more easily (e.g. faster access, and automatically track changes for index updates).