Re: Should I put pictures into a database?

At 10:14 AM +0800 11/21/07, Ronald Wiplinger wrote:

I have an application, where I use pictures. The size of the picture is about 90kB and to speed up the preview, I made a thumbnail of each picture which is about 2.5 to 5kB. I use now a directory structure of ../$a/$b/$c/<pictures> I wonder if it would be good to put the thumbnails into the current table, in a different table or leave it like it is now. Same for the pictures. What is your opinion and why?

I use both depending on need. One fact that is seldom addressed is that computational speed is increasing while storage costs are decreasing. As such, I suspect in a very short while, it won't make much difference regardless. Even now, while there is much debate over what to do, it isn't until you reach the maximums that degrades in service becomes significant when comparing the two methods. I don't know specifically how MySQL stores BLOB data, but databases typically use pointers to files (binary-tree nodes) and not the files themselves. So, the arguments of: pictures shouldn't be stored in a dB because there is nothing there to search; and I would rather use a pointer instead; are kind of moot. After all is said and done, no matter what you do with a picture (file system or dB) it is stored on a hard drive. So in a sense, a dB is not much more than a file system with more options. I am sure sometime in the future. programmers will look back on our debates and ask "What hell was all that about? Didn't these guys realize that a filing system is just another database?" Cheers, tedd -- ------- http://sperling.com http://ancientstones.com http://earthstones.com