[ome-users] Multiple backends for OMERO

[Mark Carroll]

On 07/11/2018 06:40 AM, Jake Carroll wrote:
(snip)
> ... we absolutely need to change omero from living in its own
> little world and keeping its own hierarchy to making a more distributed
> approach to compartmentalise the data structures for individuals.
>
> I.e: As it stands.
>
> OMERO àstorage structure àAll users in here.
>
> OMERO àn * storage structures for n(users)
(snip)
> Some guidance and thoughts/help would be appreciated.

OMERO as it stands is very far away from this I'm afraid: we instead
rely on the OMERO-level user permissions enforced by the server. Still,
maybe if I share some thoughts then that could help get you somewhere.

First, the original uploaded image files are easily split in
ManagedRepository according to the configuration set by
https://docs.openmicroscopy.org/latest/omero5.4/sysadmins/config.html#omero-fs-repo-path.
The BioFormatsCache directory splits itself up in the same way. However,
if the CLI "chown" command is used for one user's data to be given to
another then those image files will not be moved to that user's
directory in the filesystem.

The Files directory contains a mix of attachments, maybe also tables,
script outputs, etc., not usefully split by user at all.

The Pixels directory (which contains generated image data like
projections and pyramids for, e.g., large JPEGs) and Thumbnails
directory offer no useful split by user.

The FullText directory contains index files (of image names, comments,
attachments, etc.) that have no obvious by-file split by any OMERO entity.

So, if you only need to segregate the originally uploaded image files,
OMERO can take you some way. If you need a far stricter barrier between
users such that their data is wholly segregated on a filesystem basis
then I'd suggest creating a separate OMERO Docker instance for each user
then you can more easily segregate PostgreSQL's underlying storage too.

-- Mark

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