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Storing Images in PostgreSQL

Asked 2008-09-10T15:55:30.320
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Alright, so I'm working on an application which will use a Linux back-end running PostgreSQL to serve up images to a Windows box with the front end written in C#.NET, though the front-end should hardly matter. My question is:

  • What is the best way to deal with storing images in Postgres?

The images are around 4-6 megapixels each, and we're storing upwards of 3000. It might also be good to note: this is not a web application, there will at most be about two front-ends accessing the database at once.

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Update from 10 years later In 2008 the hard drives you would run a database on would have much different characteristics and much higher cost than the disks you would store files on. These days there are much better solutions for storing files that didn't exist 10 years ago and I would revoke this advice and advise readers to look at some of the other answers in this thread.

Original

Don't store in images in the database unless you absolutely have to. I understand that this is not a web application, but if there isn't a shared file location that you can point to save the location of the file in the database.

//linuxserver/images/imagexxx.jpg

then perhaps you can quickly set up a webserver and store the web urls in the database (as well as the local path). While databases can handle LOB's and 3000 images (4-6 Megapixels, assuming 500K an image) 1.5 Gigs isn't a lot of space file systems are much better designed for storing large files than a database is.

answered 2008-09-10T16:18:17.210

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