RSS Feeds

FAQ Topics

All FAQ's

General DBA

General Developer

DBA Performance Tuning

Developer Performance Tuning

Clustering

Error Messages

USEFUL SITES :

ASP.NET Tutorials
Windows and SQL Azure Tutorials
Cloud Hosting Magazine
SharePoint Tutorials
Windows Server Help

Write for Us

Share your SQL Server knowledge with others and raise your profile in the community More...

I would like some input on the best, most efficient way to store images for use on a website.

Question

I would like some input on the best, most efficient way to store images for use on a website. The two main options that I see are storing images as a BLOB in SQL Server, or storing the URL of the file in SQL Server, and actually storing the image file on a file share. I have heard that storing in a SQL database as BLOB can be somewhat cumbersome when it comes to retrieval. What do you recommend?

Answer

You are correct in stating that storing BLOB objects in SQL Server is cumbersome. It is also slow.

The most commonly accepted way of managing images for a website is not to store the images in the database, but only to store the URL in the database, and to store the images on a file share that has been made a virtual folder of your web server.