On Aug 6, 2009, at 5:02 PM, "Michael A. Peters" <mpeters@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Ralph Deffke wrote:
and a blob field in mysql is
the right thing, however u have to have a little php scrip, however
with a
.png extention to get the browser displaying the picture.
What is the advantage to storing an image in the database opposed to
as a flat file?
It seems to me it would require an extra database call, which could
be cached but the cache would then grow to a monster size for sites
with a lot of images.
Flat file involves a filesystem call, the disk arm has to move, but
files on the server that have recently been read are still in the
servers memory cache (at least with Linux) and do not require disk
arm movement. Database calls that are not cached also require disk
arm movement.
I ask not to criticize the procedure, but to find out if it is
really worth it.
My web app does not store images in the web root so php already is
invoked to open the file, read it, sometimes manipulate it (add a
server side watermark), and then send it. It reads the data from
flat file.
I don't have any data blobs in my database - which makes incremental
backups easier - I use rsync for files and do a nightly mysql dump.
Except for the first of the month, the diff of that nights backup
compared to first of month is saved to flat file for rsync. Binary
blobs in the database would likely mean I have to change my backup
protocol, but if it really is advantageous, I'd do it.
I do store information about the images in the database, but that's
rather small and easily cached by APC w/o needing to allocate too
much memory to APC. Add data blobs and the cache would explode in
size.
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I can tell you from painful persoanl experience that most database
tend to start having performance issues after 7-10gb of files are
stored in the table. Horrendous access times start to have big impacts
on the application.
We moved all of our clients to file based storage an just keep the
link in the table. This also reduced the size of the backups as well
Bastien
Sent from my iPod
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