> > If you wish to see images in a database at work in a production envioronment, > take a look at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/default.aspx > This database holds over 250 million images in BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects)
Well, yes. But it also has special front-end code that allows images to be passed by reference, so the image data goes directly from the database access back end to the client browser, without having to be copied to and from an intermediate middleware layer. Without that special server interface code, you more than double the cost of streaming image data (which is the largest part of an image server).
