Submission + - AppServer File Storage: DB vs. File System
Goyuix writes: This question seems to come up again and again, and never quite gets a definitive answer. There are certainly advantages to storing binary data in the database and drawbacks too. The same holds true for using the file system as [insert Deity] intended. To top things off there are probably a bunch of different tips to optimize the storage/access to that data — as well as pitfalls. Modern databases are certainly capable of handling large amounts of binary data and many of the limits of yesteryear have been addressed. My question is this: Is there any reason not to use the database? Is there a good answer for this or does it all boil down to requirements? If it is just requirements, do you have any tips to evaluate them to make the right decision? Is there one single unifying theory [Hint: the answer is 42]? To add to the speculation, some of the requirements are: ASP.NET web application using Oracle as a database, the data size is at least 50GB initially, possibly up to 500GB of PDF documents (and more into the future?). Each file ranges in size from 100KB to almost 2GB at the largest currently, and there are potentially 50,000 documents with a growth rate of maybe one thousand docs / year.
