We present and algorithm for modifying delta compressed files so that the compressed versions may be reconstructed without requiring additional memory or storage space. This allows network clients with limited resources to efficiently update software by downloading delta compressed versions over a network. Delta compression for binary files, compactly encoding a version of data with only the changed bytes from a previous version, may be used to efficiently distribute software over low bandwidth channels, such as the Internet. Traditional methods of rebuilding these delta files require memory or storage space on the target machine for both the old and new version of the file to be reconstructed. With the advent of network computing and Internet set-top boxes, many of these network attached target machines have limited additional scratch space in memory or storage. We provide an algorithm for modifying a delta compressed version file so that it may rebuild the new file version in the spa...

Most applications that access large data objects do so through file systems, but file systems provide an incomplete solution, as they maintain insufficient metadata and do not provide general purpose query engine. Storing large objects in a database addresses these problems, but, for applications that need to update object data, databases are inefficient as they do not provide direct access to data. Additionally, databases often relax the integrity and consistency constraints for large objects, as it the case with objects stored through the Binary Large Object (BLOB) data type. These shortcomings are exacerbated by multiple users or applications that wish to access large objects concurrently. We describe an architecture, based on the Datalink data type, in which large objects in a database are continuously available for read access and can be read and written through a file system interface. Additionally, this system does not relax version management, consistency and recoverability guarantees, as with the BLOB data type. 1.