I have worked with many digital storage systems and they all store digital objects on the file system. They tend to use a branch approach, so there will be an archive tree on the file system, often starting with year of entry e.g. 2009, subdirectory will be month e.g. 8 for August, next directory will be day e.g. 11 and sometimes they will use hour as well, the file will then be named with the records persistent ID. Using BLOBS has its advantages and I have heard of it being used often in the IT parts of the chemical industry for storing thousands or millions of photographs and diagrams. It can provide more granular security, a single method of backup, potentially better data integrity and improved inter media searching, Oracle has many features for this within the package they used to call Intermedia (I think it is called something else now). The file system can also have granular security provided through a system such as XACML or another XML type security object. See D Space of Fedora Object Store for examples.

SQL Server 2008提供了一个两者兼备的解决方案:文件流数据类型。

像管理普通表一样管理它，并具有文件系统的性能。

我负责一些管理许多TB图像的应用程序。我们发现在数据库中存储文件路径是最好的。

这里有几个问题:

database storage is usually more expensive than file system storage you can super-accelerate file system access with standard off the shelf products for example, many web servers use the operating system's sendfile() system call to asynchronously send a file directly from the file system to the network interface. Images stored in a database don't benefit from this optimization. things like web servers, etc, need no special coding or processing to access images in the file system databases win out where transactional integrity between the image and metadata are important. it is more complex to manage integrity between db metadata and file system data it is difficult (within the context of a web application) to guarantee data has been flushed to disk on the filesystem

我几乎从不把它们存储在数据库中。最好的方法通常是将映像存储在一个由中央配置变量控制的路径中，并根据DB表和主键(如果可能的话)命名映像。这给了你以下优势:

通过更新全局配置，将映像移动到另一个分区或服务器。 通过搜索图像的主键来查找与图像匹配的记录。 您的图像可以访问处理工具，如imagemagick。 在web应用程序中，您的图像可以由web服务器直接处理(节省处理)。 CMS工具和Coldfusion等网络语言可以处理本地上传。

其次是关于文件路径的建议。我曾经参与过几个需要管理大型资产集合的项目，任何直接在DB中存储东西的尝试都会导致长期的痛苦和沮丧。

我能想到的唯一真正的“好处”是，将它们存储在数据库中，可以方便地保存单个图像资产。如果没有可用的文件路径，并且所有图像都直接从DB中流出，那么用户就不会有发现他们不应该访问的文件的危险。

不过，这似乎可以用一个中间脚本从网络无法访问的文件存储中提取数据来更好地解决。因此，DB存储并不是真正必要的。

不经常编辑的小静态图像(不超过几兆)应该存储在数据库中。这种方法有几个好处，包括更容易移植(图像与数据库一起传输)，更容易备份/恢复(图像与数据库一起备份)和更好的可伸缩性(一个包含数千个小缩略图文件的文件系统文件夹对我来说听起来像是可伸缩性的噩梦)。

从数据库提供图像很简单，只需实现一个http处理程序，将从DB服务器返回的字节数组作为二进制流提供服务。