Re: Re: how to display images stored in DB

> On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 17:04 -0500, Mark wrote: >> Kevin Waterson wrote: >> >> > This one time, at band camp, zerof <zerof@terra.com.br> wrote: >> > >> >> It is not a good practice to store pictures in DataBases, use links, >> >> instead of. >> > >> > Rubbish, where are your benchmarks? >> >> It has almost nothing to do with benchmarks. >> >> Images are typically best supported in the form of files. They are more >> easily manipulated by external tools. >> >> The web browser sees an image as a single HTTP request. Invoking the PHP >> script engine, parsing the script, and executing a SQL query to retrieve >> the image from the database is less efficient than letting the web >> server >> just send the file. >> >> Image files do not need to be constrained by the rigid requirements of a >> relational database. >> >> I could go on, but it should be clear enough that putting images in a >> database is not a good idea. > > What about when you need to share those files across a 50 node network? Without more information about the nodes and the network design, I can't offer a good argument against it, but I can say, that given any rational system, bitmap images are better as discrete files than contents of a database. If you give me more information, I can counter with more specifics. > I'd keep it in a database, then when I need it cache a local copy on the > filesystem. Then I can just check the timestamp in the database to see > if the file has changed. Voila, multi-node high availability images. You can do that sort of operation with any number of other tools more efficiently. > > Seems better than have a local copy of every single image. I guess the > answer is... it depends on what you're doing! No, it just seems like if the only tool you are comfortable with is a hammer, then every job is more or less exactly like a nail. Databases are great tools, but there are many tasks which they can do, just not well.