Storing Images in DB – Yea or Nay?

I’m in charge of some applications that manage many TB of images. We’ve found that storing file paths in the database to be best.

There are a couple of issues:

  • database storage is usually more expensive than file system storage
  • you can super-accelerate file system access with standard off the shelf products
    • for example, many web servers use the operating system’s sendfile() system call to asynchronously send a file directly from the file system to the network interface. Images stored in a database don’t benefit from this optimization.
  • things like web servers, etc, need no special coding or processing to access images in the file system
  • databases win out where transactional integrity between the image and metadata are important.
    • it is more complex to manage integrity between db metadata and file system data
    • it is difficult (within the context of a web application) to guarantee data has been flushed to disk on the filesystem

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