[snip] ...a lot of stuff started by my original answer... [/snip] While this has been a fine debate I find that the discussion has deteriorated badly. Can we bring it back on point? There are a lot of us using MySQL (and PostGreSQL) along with PHP and in practice we have found that storing images in the database to be less than ideal from both a performance and backup POV. The reasons range from speed to overhead to ease of use. On our hardware. It not only has to do with storing and retrieving BLOB data, but also things like indexing, OS qwirks and the like. Kevin, you have more than once pointed out using a RAW format for operating the data system, what exactly do you mean? The database becomes the OS? If so, how do you set that up? It is something that I am not totally familiar with. If you are talking about RAW photo data I am familiar with that. As far as backup, I have a routine that backs up my databases AND the images, PDF's, DOC's, and other binary file format items that the data system points to. That wasn't hard to set up, and it is very reliable. I never have a problem with integrity. And finally, benchmarking. There would be three benchmarks to be conducted and concerned with here, as I have stated before; PHP and images in the OS's file system PHP and images in the MySQL database PHP and images in the OS's file system pointed to by data stored in the MySQL database. Usually only two are compared. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
