Continuum Media Group is a strong supporter of the Minneapolis area ColdFusion developer community. Part of our commitment to this involves our staff making presentations to the ColderFusion User Group at the monthly meetings (first Wednesday of every month, University of St. Thomas campus in St. Paul).

At the Decemer 1, 2004, meeting, Jared Rypka-Hauer presented an innovative method for the storage and retrieval of binary objects in a database table. This method allows ColdFusion to maintain control of the delivery of these objects, requires no server disk space outside the webroot of the application, and is able to completely secure any sort of binary data including ZIP files, MP3s, PDFs, images, executables, etc.

This method also restricts access beyond the normal method of putting files outside the webroot of a site. In order to gain access to the content, it must be possible to access the database (SQL Server in this case), query for the object, retrieve the result into a variable, convert it from base64 to binary, then to a string, then return it to the user's browser. If a hacker gains access to your directory structure on the server, he/she will still not have access to your secured binary objects.

Additional benefits include: no filesystem access (reducing webserver file read/write overhead), all-virtual transfer of binary files to the client (from DB to query to session to browser... one long stream but no files and no permanency), ability to use DB server rules and roles to further manage secure files, and the allocation of disk space to DB and DB alone instead of consuming disk space in several web-related directories.
Email Jared with questions/requests

Files served here are delivered via this method:
Download the Source Code | View a PDF stored/retrieved this way | Download the PowerPoint Presentation