> > Images are handled in the app: photo of products, photos of customers, etc. > > Each client can have thousands. > > Advise you manage images as blob in the database? or have only the URL of > > images in the database (so the image files on the hard disk)?
> > The first solution seems simpler, more secure. But is it slows down > > significantly the database? Especially if the database is encrypted? > Using a web service is different to asking the same question about an app > which runs on one computer. If your web server would serve the images > straight from files on disk, I would leave the images as individual files. > Web server software is optimised to serve many different files, caching them > intelligently. It will do a good job of working out how to serve many > different files in an efficient manner. > If you keep the image data inside the database you have to write some code > which will extract the data and present it as an 'image/jpeg' file or > whatever it is. This isn't too difficult but it's one more thing to go > wrong, the server won't be able to cache those returns, and doing the > processing (especially for an encrypted database) will require more CPU than > just serving the images from disk. If secrecy of the images is an issue make > sure you are serving over HTTPS not HTTP. The OP will also have to generate "proper" metadata and cache control when processing a GET for the image, and also be able to respond to HEAD requests to check for client-side and intermediate cache validation. On top of the server overhead incurred because the underlying data is dynamic therefore having to call into the app code and do a database dip on every HEAD and GET request, not coding the metadata and cache control correctly will result in mucho duplicated traffic to repeatedly tranfer the same unchanged image, and performance will be terrible. In other words, the application will have to duplicate the sematics of a filestore by manually accounting for all the processing that is already coded into the web server to handle static files. I'd just store the images in files on disk and syncronize the filesystem contents with the URLs stored in the database. Why go to all the complication of duplicating huge swaths of code already present in the web server and then debugging that code. Unless of course you have written web servers before and know all the nuances that you have to deal with to correctly respond to dynamic requests for (mostly) static content. --- () ascii ribbon campaign against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list [email protected] http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
