Comment by MaxBarraclough
5 years ago
I've never faced this problem so perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but what's the big difference storing binary blobs on the DB vs, say, storing URLs on the DB and hosting the blobs elsewhere? Is the size of the database the main concern?
Both approaches have their advantages.
Storing blobs on the DB makes the data more consistent (the database is always in sync with the file content), and allows you to use advanced features of the DB on these files (transactions, SQL queries, data rollback ...). You also only have to backup the DB.
Storing links to the objects is usually more scalable, as your DB will not grow as fast. DBs are usually harder to scale, and also more expensive (at least 10x per GB).
It really depends on the project, but I'm favoring more and more storing the data in BLOBs, as it makes backups easier and as I can use SQL queries directly on the data. Databases as a service also make it easy to scale DBs up to +/- 2TB. But the cost might still be an issue.
>and also more expensive (at least 10x per GB).
Expensive in what way? Memory/Compute? It can't be licensing money since SQLite is public domain.
raphaelj is probably talking about classic database machines like PostgreSQL and MariaDB.
In my view, storing blobs in sqlite doesn't have a huge disadvantage tied to it. Sqlite grows pretty linearly and as it stores the whole db in a single file, hosting provider doesn't even have to know about you using it.
I'm just comparing the per stored GB cost of on demand database services vs on demand storage services.