So I’m using an app that stores images heavily in the DB. What’s your outlook on this? I’m more of a type to store the location in the filesystem, than store it directly in the DB.
What do you think are the pros/cons?
56 Answers
I’m in charge of some applications that manage many TB of images. We’ve found that storing file paths in the database to be best.
There are a couple of issues:
- database storage is usually more expensive than file system storage
- you can super-accelerate file system access with standard off the shelf products
- for example, many web servers use the operating system’s sendfile() system call to asynchronously send a file directly from the file system to the network interface. Images stored in a database don’t benefit from this optimization.
- things like web servers, etc, need no special coding or processing to access images in the file system
- databases win out where transactional integrity between the image and metadata are important.
- it is more complex to manage integrity between db metadata and file system data
- it is difficult (within the context of a web application) to guarantee data has been flushed to disk on the filesystem