I personally think, storing images in DB (any kind of RDBMS that supports it only because other DBs do) is: *Good* because makes it portable and easily administered, *Bad* because obviously, more flexible things get - less performance you achieve. In my opinion, unless you have no *real* need to do so, you can still leave the images in your files system, just organize them well and use DB for associating the data and referencing to them. I know it doesn't really answer your question, but think about it - if you store all the pictures in one directory, as they get over (1024?) you'll start suffering from that very issue that I never encountered personally yet but am aware of - file system limits. Storing them all in a DB would give you flexibility and more headaches about the performance. :-) Sincerely,
Maxim Maletsky Founder, Chief Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] PHPBeginner.com (Where PHP Begins) www.phpbeginner.com <http://www.phpbeginner.com/> -----Original Message----- From: Fifield, Mike [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 9:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: 'Maxim Maletsky' Subject: Storing images in MySql After posting my question about performance earlier this morning it was suggested that I also store the jpg's in the database, (thanks Maxim). I did a little research and got a lot of conflicting information on weather this is a good idea or not. For example the following url states that you suffer a 30% performance hit by doing it this way. http://www.zend.com/zend/trick/tricks-sept-2001.php Is anyone out there running a website that stores images as binary data in MySql that could comment on this? Any and all comments are welcome. Mike