A point of contention usually arises with the topic of relational databases
and binary large object (BLOB) data: Is it better to integrate BLOBs within
the database or store them in the file system? Each method has its advantages
and disadvantages.
Storing BLOB data such as images, audio files, and executable files in the
database with typical text and numeric data lets you keep all related information
for a given database entity together. And this approach enables easy search
and retrieval of the BLOB data; you simply query its related text information.
However, storing BLOB data can dramatically increase the size of your databases.
The common alternative to this technique is storing binary files outside the
database, then including as data in the database a file path or URL to the object.
This separate storage method has a couple of advantages over integrating BLOB
data within the database. It’s somewhat faster because reading data from
the file system involves a bit less overhead than reading data from a database.
And without the BLOBs, your databases tend to be smaller. However, you must
manually create and maintain a link between the database and external file system
files, which have the potential to get out of sync. In addition, you usually
need a unique naming or storage scheme for the OS files to clearly identify
the potentially hundreds or even thousands of BLOB files. Storing BLOB data
within the database eliminates these problems by letting you store BLOB data
along with its related relational data.
