The answer is "it depends" and in some very specialized situations storing binaries in the database might be the best solution. But in general, this approach will cause you serious problems. Some ramifications: 1) Browsers won't cache the images. So you'll take a CPU and bandwidth hit every time 2) MySQL stores encoded binary data in a separate part of the database. Your files probably won't get held in the memory cache. So each file load carries the same penalty as a loading the raw file from disk. 3) It will make your database huge. Which will make it very challenging to import, export, and move between test servers. Its easy to write scripts that can handle content files that are missing from the server, but a database is an atomic "all or nothing" thing. 4) Makes it difficult to manually edit things in the database. My team is building a huge (hundreds of thousands of LOC) image management plugin for WordPress. Have a look at our code and see how we solve these problems. Specifically, look at the disk cache classes. http://code.google.com/p/buddypress-media/source/browse/#svn%2Fbp_media%2Ftrunk ^C^ ================================== On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Jacob Kruger <jacobk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > Just wondering if it's better to either store uploaded images, via > something like a form of CMS, in a static folder, with a unique name based > on something like the data record's id field, when keeping track of it's > location like that, or is it better to actually store the binary data of > the image file in the mySQL database itself, and then sort of stream it > back out when displaying the image, and if so, would presume that would be > relatively simple to implement, but, OTOH, if you were then using the data > to then render static content output for later use, it would, obviously, be > better to keep the image content static as well...? > > Thoughts/examples? > > Stay well > > Jacob Kruger > Blind Biker > Skype: BlindZA > '...fate had broken his body, but not his spirit...' >
