Which is better ...

Anon

Should I store a file (image) directly in the DB (MySQL) or should I uplaod it to the file system?

Thanks,

Colin

Anon

I do not know the exact answer to this, but it depends on your site.

Some say that if the site recieves large number of hits and that particular image is used again and again, then it might get bit slow on response as you are making the connection to db all the time.

BUT... if your page is generated dynamically and contains info from your db, then i guess you already have the connection open, so why not simply retrieve the image from the db aswell?

still, we need some solid reasoning on not using db to store images.

Anon

Well...
This is an age old question.... You should search the archives at the mysql site... The general thought is that you should store the graphic as a file, and only save the name and other info in the database.
The reasoning was that you'd end up having a huge database, which might slow down the performance of queries and if it did get corrupted you'd really be screwed.
I have not seen benchmarks between the two... I coded a web site using the database methodogly and there did seem to be a delay bringing up the graphic, and also some caching issues.
Also since you will not be searching on the blob file directly, it probably makes sense to get it out of the the database.
But you may have certain needs which makes you have to use the database... One person wrote that they have type of escort service or something else seedy in which they didn't want people to have direct access to the images and therefore put it in a database, but I think this could have been worked around with the readfile() Command...
this will actually output the contents of a file directly to the brower, with a header used prior to this, it should be able to output graphic files without giving away the name of the underlying file. I'm going to be trying this shorly....

Joe