database vs filesystem performance

[Christopher Browne]

On 8/7/05, Marc Lijour <marc-bbkyySd1vPWsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> Does somebody know the compared performance of the filesystem against a 
> RDBMS?


Do you mean for storage of BLOBs? (Binary Large OBjects)

There is likely to be somewhat more overhead for BLOBs in a DBMS than there 
is in storing the data in files in a filesystem as there are likely to be 
more things that they will be linked to in a DBMS.

Mind you, filesystems and DBMSes have been converging in how they implement 
storage of data, as most of the modern systems use blocks and extents 
whether we're talking about a "database" or a "filesystem."

Storing the data in a DBMS is a sword that cuts on both edges; on the useful 
side, BLOBs can be managed in a transactional fashion, which may be helpful 
to reliability of your application. (And if that's needful, it may be worth 
some overhead.) On the "other cutting edge," interfacing tends to be a bit 
of a pain, as the files won't be transparently available from the shell 
level.

Informix was trying to push this usage of Version 10 of their database, and 
doubtless pushed out some benchmarks.

You're doubtless better off constructing a benchmark for your own use case, 
as that's the only way you'll get a useful comparison.


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