Let me try to make a metaphor for you. Imagine that you create HTML content, and you're considering sharing it with the world. You propose to create a "web server". The DBA next to you says you should just use MySQL. Stunned, you try to explain that your proposed "web server" will communicate using this new "HyperText Transfer Protocol." The DBA counters that SQL is fine. You try to explain about dynamic content and PHP, etc. The DBA counters that SQL stored procedures can do all of that.
Next thing you know, grandma is typing:
SELECT * FROM GOOGLE.COM WHERE TITLE LIKE "%CAT PICTURES%";
That's just an analogy, of course. But perhaps you can imagine your own list of reasons why MySQL didn't replace Apache.
The answer to your question is that we could not possibly use any off the shelf software to provide the interfaces we needed (we were writing our own). By the time we had bytes that we needed to store somewhere, our data was about a GB of complicated structure that we accessed as memory-mapped files. (Look at https://capnproto.org/ for a rough analogy to the kind of access we needed.)
And what I didn't say was that the DBA was literally recommending MySQL BLOBs, storing a bit more than 0.5 MB (512 * 512 * 2 bytes of image data) in each row, having a thousand rows or more per CT scan. The performance of that would have been absolute crap. It made literally zero sense.
Next thing you know, grandma is typing:
SELECT * FROM GOOGLE.COM WHERE TITLE LIKE "%CAT PICTURES%";
That's just an analogy, of course. But perhaps you can imagine your own list of reasons why MySQL didn't replace Apache.
The answer to your question is that we could not possibly use any off the shelf software to provide the interfaces we needed (we were writing our own). By the time we had bytes that we needed to store somewhere, our data was about a GB of complicated structure that we accessed as memory-mapped files. (Look at https://capnproto.org/ for a rough analogy to the kind of access we needed.)
And what I didn't say was that the DBA was literally recommending MySQL BLOBs, storing a bit more than 0.5 MB (512 * 512 * 2 bytes of image data) in each row, having a thousand rows or more per CT scan. The performance of that would have been absolute crap. It made literally zero sense.