Things not to put into Your Database (1 Viewer)

Images, files, and binary data

Your database supports BLOBs so it must be a good idea to shove your files in there right? No it isn't! Hell it isn't even very convenient to use with many DB language bindings.
There are a few of problems with storing files in your database:

• read/write to a DB is always slower than a filesystem
• your DB backups grow to be huge and more time consuming
• access to the files now requires going through your app and DB layers

The last two are the real killers. Storing your thumbnail images in your database? Great now you can't use nginx or another lightweight web server to serve them up.

Here is the full article

http://www.revsys.com/blog/2012/may/01/three-things-you-should-never-put-your-database/



Simon

There are good licencing reasons to avoid doing this too.

We have a third party web based system that stores pdfs in the database. Every month several thousand files are added to it.

Consequently the free MS SQL Express can't handle the size of it. The supplier is a MicroSoft partner and I strongly suspect the licencing revenue is the main driver of the ridicuous architecture.

We also required a per processor client access license because the data is being served to an arbitrary number of end users. Had the system stored the files in the file system and the webserver just looked up the database as an index this extra $11,000 license would not have been required.

It really is strange that the MS marketing department often tries to promote this as a "feature".

This is the kind of bulls* that gives companies a bad name.