We have developed a web-based architecture and user interface for fast storage, searching and retrieval of large, distributed, files resulting from scientific simulations. We demonstrate that the new DATALINK type defined in the draft SQL Management of External Data Standard can help to overcome problems associated with limited bandwidth when trying to archive large files using the web. We also show that separating the user interface specification from the user interface processing can provide a number of advantages. We provide a tool to generate automatically a default user interface specification, in the form of an XML document, for a given database. This facilitates deployment of our system by users with little web or database development experience. The XML document can be customised to change the appearance of the interface. 1.

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.