For all those database gurus out there

k9underdog

OK... here's the deal. I'm building a CMS that will hold a large number of sites. I will have several account types, and each account type will have a space quota. So... what I was planning to do was to store the users' images / files on the main database, but I'm not sure if this will be any better / faster than using files.

I'd like to know how you would do it.

For example, vBulletin stores it's attachments on the database...

nnichols

Personally , I tend to avoid storing files in my databases. Instead I always store the files in the file system but use my database to name and index the files.

People have differing views on this and I'm sure someone will say that they store all their data in their db and that I'm totally wrong.

When I first came across this question I ran several tests to see what the performance pros/cons were. I found that it was always quicker using the file system, especially under any significant load.

Hope this helps 😉

k9underdog

Well... you just had an excelent idea. Although I need to account used traffic, I can simply store the file sizes on the database. I would put the files on a directory that would not be accessible by the browser... same thing applies to the images. Everytime I wanted to download a file, I would call something like

http://www.myhost.com/download.php?id=234234234

What I have in mind for the files table is:

id
user
filename
filetype
filesize
content (if I would use the DB-storing sollution)

As for the images, I would do it the following way

id
user
filename
width
height
filesize
format (jpeg, gif, whatever)
content (if using the db-storing sollution)

I don't want users to be able to access the files directlly, because as i've said before, I need to account in a fast way the bandwidth used. This way I would add the file's size to the used bandwidth field, send the appropriate header (according to the file's type) and dump the file's content.

Thanks for your heads up 🙂