Re: Serving BLOB from the database

At 09:43 AM 8/29/2002, Manavendra Gupta wrote:
>I'm sure there has been discussion in the past about the same, but I'm
>more interested in the feasibility/performance of serving images (stored
>as BLOB) from the database.

Is there a reason that you're not using interMedia here? interMedia is pretty well optimized for doing exactly this.

>1. For a large multi-tier application (client, web-tier, application,
>database), with about 5 million records upfront (possibly an image
>associated with each of them), about 300 concurrent users expected, would
>the gurus recommend serving images from the database?
> 1.1 The images will not be served in bulk, but one per request (only
> on the details page would the user get to see the image).

I certainly would want to do it that way. From a development point of view, it's a lot easier to deal with 5 million rows of data in a table somewhere than a file system with 5 million images. No worries about how the images are names, how they're stored (most O/S's limit the number of files you can have per directory, the number of subdirectories you can have, etc). Plus, you've got everything in one place for backups.

>2. Wouldn't it be better to serve images from a dedicated box, at the web
>tier? This way I could just farm the web-tier and wouldn't have to worry
>about the images much?

If you use something like webCache on the middle tier, that may accomplish much of what you're after, keeping a the data in the database.

>3. Is serving images from the database scalable?

Yes. I've seen benchmarks that had interMedia faster than a standard file system in a three-tier configuration. Slightly slower in a two-tier configuration, but certainly scaling.

Justin Cave

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