Hi all,

I need a suggestion from you all.

I am going to develop a project with Interbase and delphi.
In this project i have to use lot of pictures (around 10,000 or more with size 10GB or more). I want a suggestion from you all to handle the pictures.

I have two ideas:

1) To store the pictures in the Interbase table as BLOB    
   with Integer reference and a filename for each picture.
2) To store the pictures in the Harddrive and store the
   path of the pictures in the interbase table with
   integer index.

Please suggest me which way is good to handle these many pictures or else suggest me a new one if you already have experience in handling these many pictures.

Thank you all in advance
Raja

It depends on your needs.

For example, when you have them inside your database, it's easy to replicate or do a backup. It's also easy to use them from whatever language in pretty much the same way (always using SQL to retrieve the actual image).

When inside the database, you cannot break the image links by moving the images to another location.

On the other hand, if the images are used elsewhere (eg: webpage), it might be easier to store just a filename.

Martijn Tonies
Database Workbench - the developer tool for InterBase, Firebird, MySQL & MS SQL Server
http://www.upscene.com