New SQL Server and Photos

[Frank Bishop]

I heard that you can store photos with the row in the new SQL Server (a
photo data type?). Is this true? If so, is there a speed advantage if
you have an e-commerce platform with thousands of products?

Help appreciated.
Thanks,
Frank

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[Simon Hayes]

I'm not sure what you're referring to - MSSQL already supports the
image data type for storing up to 2GB of binary data in a row (which
could be photos or anything else).

Although I haven't worked with a system like that myself, previous
newsgroup posts seem to suggest that many people prefer to store only a
path to the binary file in the database, and leave the file itself in
the filesystem.

Simon

[Serdar Yegulalp]

> Although I haven't worked with a system like that myself, previous

newsgroup posts seem to suggest that many people prefer to store only a path to the binary file in the database, and leave the file itself in
the filesystem.

That's been my approach. The file system's on the whole a much more
efficient way to deal with such things, provided you've guarded against
path-traversal security problems and the like. For one, you're
funnelling less data through SQL Server itself, and two, NTFS is built
to handle exactly this kind of work in the first place.

There may be some circumstances where you need to have the data in the
row -- I think TerraServer uses this approach -- but most people are
not going to be building TerraServer!