# Storage for images: Database BLOBs or files?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 29, 2005, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336 "2005-12-29T21:35:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/daeltar)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2005, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336/1 "2005-12-29T21:35:30Z")

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I can’t decide where store images for my Rails application.

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**Author:** ![daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/daeltar)\
**Post date:** [December 29, 2005, 9:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336/2 "2005-12-29T21:46:00Z")

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Its a matter of taste and application.

If your building a large system, then it’s likely best to place the  
images  
into the database and have your application pull them from the DB,  
create a  
cache file that would then be referenced…if your making a personal  
site  
then you can just upload to a folder (path of your choosing, say,  
‘/images’  
or ‘/graphics’).

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**Author:** ![daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/daeltar)\
**Post date:** [December 30, 2005, 6:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336/3 "2005-12-30T06:54:29Z")

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On 12/29/05, Joe Y. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> If your building a large system, then it’s likely best to place the images  
> into the database and have your application pull them from the DB, create a  
> cache file that would then be referenced…if your making a personal site  
> then you can just upload to a folder (path of your choosing, say, ‘/images’  
> or ‘/graphics’).

Interesting. I assume this is for ease of deployment/backup, i.e. all  
the  
important data lives in the database. But what about performance? I am  
storing images in an Oracle database for an application written in a  
different language and framework. One of the things I am looking into is  
breaking image storage out of the database in hopes of improving  
performance.

Joe, would you like to go into more detail about explicit creation and  
use  
of a cache file? And do you have any data on relative performance of  
images  
stored in a database and images stored in a file system and referenced  
via a  
database? (I don’t have any benchmarks, just notions from watching page  
reloads. Perhaps some performance measuring should be my first step.)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@daeltar](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/daeltar)\
**Post date:** [December 30, 2005, 6:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/storage-for-images-database-blobs-or-files/51336/4 "2005-12-30T18:34:15Z")

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On 12/30/05, Cynthia K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> storing images in an Oracle database for an application written in a  
> different language and framework. One of the things I am looking into is  
> breaking image storage out of the database in hopes of improving  
> performance.
> 
> Joe, would you like to go into more detail about explicit creation and use  
> of a cache file? And do you have any data on relative performance of images  
> stored in a database and images stored in a file system and referenced via a  
> database? (I don’t have any benchmarks, just notions from watching page  
> reloads. Perhaps some performance measuring should be my first step.)

Putting the images in the database is at least 50 times slower than  
reading them from disk, usually slower. Also, it will make your  
database backups take forever, if there are a significant number of  
them. Given that, I’d say it’s more about scaling than about  
performance or backups. You can stand up as many application servers  
as you want without worrying about syncing up the images to all of  
them.

One approach would be to make an include\_image() helper that talked to  
your Image model. The helper would first check to see if  
/images/wherever/image\_file\_name.png already existed locally. If so,  
serve it up and you’re done. If not, grab the matching BLOB from the  
model, and write it out to disk for next time.

Try searching Google and this mailing list for mentions of MemCached.  
Even though that deals with slabs of memory instead of files on disk,  
the principles are pretty much the same; whenever you get something  
from the db, keep a copy locally in case you need it later, and have  
all your find\_stuff() code check there before executing any queries.

If you have DBAs, make sure they know what you’re going to do. They  
might balk at adding 50GB of BLOB data to their precious servers. Heh.