Storing Images in the Database?

  • Hello All,

    I needed your advice on something that I have been thinking off. We have images, large(40K each) and thumbnail(10K) which are currently stored on a NAS - there are approx million jpgs for each, that is large and thumbnail. We also have around 500,000 attachments that are also stored on a NAS. Maintainance becomes an issue and my backups take forever on these and while testing a restore, it took forever as well.

    I know storing this type of data in the database is not a good idea, or at least thats what I think. I have never tried it so I don't know. For simplifying the management of these, I was thinking if I was to do this, I would store these in a different database, but on our main Prod database. Just wondering if someone has done this and what are the potential pit falls and performance issues they faced and what they did to resolve it.

    Thanks in advance.

    Vik.

  • It still will take a lot of time to backup and you will lose performance on the application side to maintain the jpegs.

    Are you afraid of losing the data integrity of you lose the files or this is somehting you can live with?

  • If the images do not change often then it may be OK and you can have a different backup strategy for it but if they do I think it may be easier to keep them in the File system. If those millions you mention are really many millons a DB is going to probably be faster than the FS

    Just my $0.02

     


    * Noel

  • Have a look on this topic where I've got the same problem: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=65&messageid=192093



    Bye
    Gabor

  • Seems that Microsoft sharepoint portal uses a SQL database to store documents. Presumably, Microsoft is aware of their system drawbacks. Once they choose to use SQL database instead of file system, there must be no or negligent overhead cost perfomance wise.

     

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