文件存储。Facebook的工程师们对此进行了热烈的讨论。一个收获是了解目录中文件的实际限制。

大海捞针:高效存储数十亿张照片

当然是文件系统。然后你可以使用所有的操作系统功能来处理这些图像-备份，web服务器，甚至只是使用imagemic之类的工具进行批量修改。如果您将它们存储在DB中，那么您需要编写自己的代码来解决这些问题。

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

在数据库中只存储映像的文件路径的问题是，不能再强制数据库的完整性。

如果文件路径所指向的实际映像变得不可用，则数据库会不知不觉地出现完整性错误。

考虑到图像是被寻找的实际数据，并且它们可以在一个集成的数据库中更容易地管理(图像不会突然消失)，而不必与某种文件系统(如果文件系统是独立访问的，图像可能会突然“消失”)，我倾向于将它们直接存储为BLOB或类似的文件系统。

如果您使用Teradata，那么Teradata Developer Exchange有一篇关于加载和检索lobs和blobs的详细文章。

http://developer.teradata.com/applications/articles/large-objects-part-1-loading

正如有人已经提到的，“视情况而定”。如果数据库中的存储被认为是文件系统的1对1替代方案，那么它可能不是最佳选择。

但是，如果数据库后端将提供额外的值，而不仅仅是blob的序列化和存储，那么它可能是真正有意义的。

You may take a look at WKT Raster which is a project aiming at developing raster support in PostGIS which in turn serves as a geospatial extension for PostgreSQL database system. Idea behind the WKT Raster is not only to define a format for raster serialization and storage (using PostgreSQL system), but, what's much more important than storage, is to specify database-side efficient image processing accessible from SQL. Long story short, the idea is to move the operational weight from client to database backend, so it take places as close to storage itself as possible. The WKT Raster, as PostGIS, is dedicate to applications of specific domain, GIS.

要获得更完整的概述，请查看该系统的网站和演示文稿(PDF)。