SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem
I must point out Jim Gray's paper To Blob or Not To Blob[0]. His team considered NTFS vs. SQL Server, but most rationale applies to any filesystem vs. database decision.The summary was "The study indicates that if objects are larger than one megabyte on average, NTFS has a clear advantage over SQL Server. If the objects are under 256 kilobytes, the database has a clear advantage. Inside this range, it depends on how write intensive the
workload is," but keep in mind this is spinning media from 2006. Modern SSDs change the equation quite a bit, as they are much more friendly to random IO and benefit less from database write-ahead log and buffer pool behavior.Also, when deciding between blob vs. filesystem, blobs bring transactional and recovery consistency. The DB is self contained, and all blobs are contained in it. A restore of the DB on a different system yields a consistent system, it won't have links to missing files, and there won't be orphaned files left over (files not referenced by records in DB).Despite all this, my practical experience is that filesystem is better than blobs for things like uploaded content, images, pngs and jps etc. Blobs bring additional overhead, require bigger DB storage (more expensive usually, think AWS RDS) and the increased size cascades in operational overhead (bigger backups, slower restore etc).[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/to-blob...