BLOB or URL for PDFs?

[jrahma]

Hi,

I have company policies and I want to put it under the employee internet access on our website.

All the policies are in PDF format.

What's the best and recommended way to do it?

Should I put it in a BLOB or just use a PDF url then display it when the user clicks on the url?

Thanks,
Jassim

[NogDog]

I generally prefer just storing the URL (or file name, or whatever is needed to fetch the file). That way you let the file system handle file stuff, and the database just has to handle a comparatively small piece of data.

[sneakyimp]

Yeah I can't think of any real reason to take a PDF file and cram it into a DB as a blob. You put data into a database so that you can query it. I can't think of any way that having the actual binary contents of your PDF in a database is going to be useful. There might be some reason, but I can't think of any.