On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 15:54, Jeremy Haile wrote: > Yeah - it can make it easier to implement transactional semantics by > storing them in the database, although for simple operations it wouldn't > be hard to replicate this manually. And you are going to incur a > performance penalty by storing them in the database. > > Another thing to consider is that storing them in the file system makes > it much easier to browse the images using third-party tools, update > them, archive them (by gzipping or whatever). This is much more > difficult if they are stored in the database. The biggest performance penalty from them being in the same database as your data is that they're going to be the majority of your kernel / database buffers. So, as mentioned earlier, it's almost a necessity (for performance reasons) to put them into their own db server.