Storage Silos

Modified on Wed, Feb 28 at 2:00 PM

Storage Silos

A Storage Silo is a storage area for documents managed by Genesis.

Storage Silos generally map one to one with an Oracle Tablespace.

Storage Silos can optionally have a cap on the size of documents that can be stored in the silo.

Create a SILO

Storage Silos are created on the Doc Mgt>Storage Silos screen. Simply fill in the fields and hit the add button.

You must have at least one tablespace available in order to create a new storage silo. Multiple silos can be stored in the same tablespace.

Code

The code is an internal code used by Genesis to identify this storage silo. The code also determines the underlying database table that is created to manage the documents in this silo. Once a code is set; it can never be changed.

Name

The name is a brief description of what is in the Storage Silo. Most districts will have just one storage silo; so a name like documents is a good place to start. If you know that you will be hosting massive amounts of documents, you can create silos perhaps by year; or by types of documents (such medical, photos etc). Do not worry too much about it; in the future; Genesis will have tools to move documents between storage silos.

Tablespace

This field dictates which Oracle tablespace new documents will be added to. It is possible to change this tablespace after the Silo has been in use. You may create a new tablespace for the upcoming school year; and change the silo to that space to direct future documents to that tablespace.

Max Size

This fields puts a hard cap on the storage use of a silo in megabytes. This number is the maximum sum of all documents compressed size.

Read Only

You can put a storage silo into read only mode with this option. As it's name implies; document creation will not be allowed in this silo until this option is unset.

SILO Internals

A storage silo is a database table called SILO_CODE where CODE is defined above.

The table structure internally looks like this:

Column	Type	Not Null	Description
OBJECT_ID	NUMBER(22)	Y	Unique internal identified for this document. Number assignment is managed by an Oracle Sequence SILO_CODE_SEQ.
MIMETYPE	VARCHAR2(255)		The mimetype of the binary data stored in this row (test/plain for example)
EXTENSION	VARCHAR2(25)		The extension of the file (pdf doc xls for example)
BINARY_DATA	Secure File BLOB		The raw data stored in the database. This data is stored as a secure file binary large object.
BINARY_SIZE	NUMBER(12)		The size in bytes of the document uncompressed.
COMPRESSED_BINARY_SIZE	NUMBER(12)		The size in bytes of the document compressed.

This table is not accessible from Report Writer. Instead; when working with documents with Report Writer; use the STUDENT_DOCUMENTS table instead.

Document Compression

Documents are compressed using the ZLIB compression algorithm.