Most people will only create one M3 database, connect to it, and never again worry about it.  The odds are that you do not need to read this chapter.  If you've just purchased M3 and are trying to learn about using it, please skip this section.  If you want to learn about the details of the M3 database and have an understanding of database concepts, this section will describe how M3 stores its information in the DB and ICONS directories.

Database Directories Overview

M3's database consists of two directories.  The simpler of the two is ICONS and it copntains a small icon representation of your image collection.  The contents of this directory are individual files with the same name as the image they catalog and the extension .sxi.  Feel free to delete these files anytime you wish to open up disk space.

The more complex directory is DB and that is the directry explained in this section.  Please do not modify or rename the files in this directory.

Database Contents

ICONS contains the following information:
 

Name	Number	Size (ea)	Description
*.sxi	0-Ni	2-4k	Iconized version of image file in JPEG format.

(Ni is number of images)

Total size of the ICONS directory can be up to 300M for every 5G of images.  Normally it will be much less.

DB contains the following informstion:
 

Name	Number	Size (ea)	Description
attr*.sxa	0-Na	0-Ni bits	Attribute information per image
attrs.dat	1	~10k	Overall attribute information
dirs.dat	1	~5k	Information on directories
drives.dat	1	~5k	Information on drives and media
files.dat	1	Na x 512	Information on images.
files.idx	1	Na x 32	Index & usage information
forsoka.dat	1	1k	Search & client key
info.dat	1	1k	Information about database
oi.dat	1	1k	Object key

(Ni is number of images, Na is number of attributes)

Total size of DB directory is about 55M for every 5G of images.