Serving BLOB from the database

[Manavendra Gupta]

Hi,   I'm sure there has been discussion in the past about the same, but I'm more interested in the feasibility/performance of serving images (stored as BLOB) from the database.   1. For a large multi-tier application (client, web-tier, application, database), with about 5 million records upfront (possibly an image associated with each of them), about 300 concurrent users expected, would the gurus recommend serving images from the database?     1.1 The images will not be served in bulk, but one per request (only on the details page would the user get to see the image). 2. Wouldn't it be better to serve images from a dedicated box, at the web tier? This way I could just farm the web-tier and wouldn't have to worry about the images much? 3. Is serving images from the database scalable? 4. What about backups? This data would not change much (once uploaded the user would hardly make any changes).     With Warm Regards, Manav.