Saving images: files or blobs?

Question

When you save your images (supose you have lots of them) do you store then as blobs in your Database, or as files? Why?

Duplicate of: Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?

Answer 1

By saving you mean to use them to show in a webpage or something like that? If it's the case, the better option will be to use files, if you use a database it will be constantly hammered with the request for photos. And it's a situation that doesn't scale too well.

Answer 2

The performance hit of a database server is a moot issue. If you need the performance benefits of a file system, you simply cache it there on the first request. Subsequent requests can then be served directly from the file system by a direct link (which, in case of a web app, you could rewrite the HTML with before flushing the output buffer).

This provides the best of both worlds:

• The authoritative store is the database, keeping transactional and referential integrity
• You can deploy all user data by simply deploying the database
• Emptying this cache (e.g. by adding a web server) would only cause a temporary performance hit while it is refilled automatically.

There is no need to constantly hammer the database for things that won't change all the time, but the important thing is that the user data is all there and not scattered around different places, making multi-server operation and deployment a total mess. I'm always advocating the "database as the user data store, unless" approach, because it is better architecturally, and not necessarily slower with effective caching.

Having said that, a good reason to use the file system as the authoritative store would be when you really need to use external independent tools for accessing it, e.g. SFTP and whatnot.

Answer 3

Given that you might want to save an image along with a name, brief description, created date, created by, etc., you might find it better to save in a database. That way, everything is together. If you saved this same info and stored the image as a file, you would have to retrieve the whole "image object" from two places...and down the road, you might find yourself having syncing issues (some images not being found). Hopefully this makes sense.

Answer 4

I've tried to use the db (SQL Server and MySQL) to store medium (< 5mb) files, and what I got was tons of trouble.

1) Some DBs (SQL Server Express) have size limits;

2) Some DBs (MySQL) become mortally slow;

3) When you have to display a list of object, if you inadvertedly do SELECT * FROM table, tons of data will try to go up and down from the db, resulting in a deadly slow response or memory fail;

4) Some frontends (ruby ActiveRecord) have very big troubles handling blobs.

Just use files. Don't store them all in the same directory, use some technique to put them on several dirs (for instance, you could use last two chars of a GUID or last two digits of an int id) and then store the path on db.

Answer 5

The question is, does your application handle BLOBS or other files like other application data? Do your users upload images alongside other data? If so, then you ought to store the BLOBs in the database. It makes it easier to back up the database and, in the event of a problem, to recover to a transactionally consistent state.

But if you mean images which are part of the application infratstructure rather than user data then probably the answer is, No.

Answer 6

It depends on the size of the image.

Microsoft Research has an interesting document on the subject