I don't think there is a suitable 'one size fits all' answer to this question. A lot will depend on how you intend to use the blobs and what sort of hardware architecture, especially storage systems, you have. At first glance, sticking everything in the DB seems like an easy choice. However, that can result in very large databases, which in turn can lead to issues with respect to backup, replication etc. If all your after is storage, then sometimes your better off using the file system for the blobs and keeping the metadata in the db. It can potentially be faster and easier to serve up blobs from the file system compared to the db if that is the main use case, but if the blobs are more dynamic or you use collections of blobs to build a master blob etc, the db has some advantages. If you really need database like functionality, given the relative cheapness of storage and the wealth of options available, storing the blobs in the database can have advantage. However, it will be important to select the most appropriate datatype. What some people think of as a 'blob' is just an array of bytes to many DBs and as usual, you need to make the decision as to what is the best storage representation for your requirements, keeping in mind that the more general 'blob' like storage type you choose often represents a loss in functionality but an increase in flexibility wrt to what can be inserted over more precise data types, which will be more restrictive about what can be inserted, but offer more functionality regarding what you can do with it (at the db level). Tim Thomas Güttler <guettliml@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Some days ago I asked "Where **not** to use PostgreSQL?" on this mailing list. > > Now I realized: Nobody talked about Blobs. > > I guess most people do not store Blobs in PostgresSQL. > > Where do you store Blobs? > > (In my case Blobs are PDF/image files with size up to 20 MByte. > I do not talk about very big blobs which are several hundret MByte) -- Tim Cross
