database vs filesystem performance

[Marc Lijour]

On August 7, 2005 21:39, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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.

Is it smart then to convert binary as human readable hex strings?
It is likely to increase storage and what about performance (speed)?

> 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.

I don't need concurrency control.

> 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.

That is a nice idea. I am just curious -I can not afford to be more than that 
because the design choices in this case come from far above myself :-)
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