Comment by excerionsforte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by excerionsforte | Hacker News Reader

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Unsubstantiated generalizations are the sort I disagree with strongly. Why? because it never looks at the use case. Dismissing all ideas just on the basis of one thing is a documented Anti-Pattern.

Let's do google search 'storing blobs' to find what do people have to say with their experiences.

First link: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/2445/should-binary-f...

>Most RDBMS have optimizations for storing BLOBs (eg SQL Server filestream) anyway

Second to last link: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-a-bad-design-to-store-images-as-...

> Bill Karwin is correct that you can't make unequivocal statement that storing images in a database is always bad. I like a lot of his points. Most people who are against images in the DB usually are promoting the only thing they know how to do.

and I'm not talking about images. Object data that I would serialize is can very between 512b to 64kb (Always interesting to see the scale of memory nowadays, kb is so small).

Those answers are both dubious and very outdated. At the time they were written, the most mature and widely available solution for blob storage was the filesystem, which has its own set of shortcomings for that use case. This is no longer true, and that alone frankly makes those answer obsolete.

Then you have the fact that those answers are ignoring a lot of facts. The answer you referenced from Bill Karwin talks about mutating blobs. This isn’t a reasonable design pattern at all, you create a new blob and update the reference. The downsides to storing blobs in an rdbms are so numerous that you’d really have to have a very strong justification for doing so, and I’m really struggling to think of any that are actually technical.

One i saw, was a banking backend; stored blobs retrieved by accountnumber from the mainframe were passed to mid-tier servers that mounted the blobs as r/w db instances.

Sort of like piles of sqlite db's on S3

I mean, you do you, but you probably see the pattern in the responses to your comment.

It is theoretically possible that there’s a good use case for storing all fields in a blob. It’s just that none of the ones you mentioned are ones I agree with.

The only thing that makes sense to store in a blob is something that is otherwise incomprehensible (e.g. a jpeg file, doesn’t fit in any other column type), and even that is a bad idea.

Dissenting/disbelief responses do not appear to be from people who've worked with RDBMS at the high scale. I'm content with being able to keep the system simple, sleep at night, not getting pings for database and feeling good about the choice. Big enough reward for me and any others who have dealt with this.

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