Re: Where are BLOBs useful?

[Rick James]

Whether to store, say, images in a BLOB or in separate files -- this is a frequent debate.

The argument in favor of storing in a BLOB is consistency. With a separate file, you are more likely to accidentally delete the db row or the image file without removing the other part of the pair. If both are in the database, either in the same row, or in a separate table, things are 'safer'. If in separate tables, "ON DELETE CASCADE" can even make it so that deleting one automatically deletes the other.

Is this a sufficiently strong argument? You decide.

With images to be displayed on a web site, it is arguably more convenient to use the db generating the <img src=...> tag, and separately serve the image directly from the web server without touching the database.