From: Martijn Tonies
Date: February 15 2010 9:53am
Subject: Re: how things get messed up
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/220692
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>> I am in the situation to storing student and staff images. every year 
>> 2000
>> new photos has to be added in our application.
>>
>> Can i have your suggestion, which is the best one, storing as a blob Or
>> using NFS?
>> It will be great help to me, because such experts are sharing your own
>> experience on this binary storage issue.
>>
>
>
> I never said you had to grovel, though :-p
>
> This whole thread has been a discussion of just that. My personal opinion 
> is
> that it's better to store binary objects (like images) out-of-band, for
> instance on an NFS system like you suggest. Other people on the list have
> made their own arguments for BLOB storage.
>
> In the end, it's down to your own situation and decisions, but I will keep
> defending the position that filesystems are made for storing files, and
> databases are made for storing data - it saves you on both database and 
> PHP
> requests, as (from a web point of view) you can't return the image data
> inside your HTML - it requires a second HTTP call. Filesystem image 
> serving,

Doesn't an image always required additional http calls from the <IMG> tag?

> however, could perfectly be offloaded to a subdomain that runs a
> lightweight, threaded HTTP server that need not run the heavy PHP 
> processes.
> You could even run that on your NFS server, if you want.
>
> If you do go for BLOBs, though, for god's sake keep them in a separate
> table, lest you fragment your datafiles. Split records are a disaster for
> performance.

I agree -for MySQL-, but this is a MySQL limitation!! Not a DBMS one.

With regards,

Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com

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