You will get many people saying don't because if not implemented well it can bite ya. Don't be concerned about "optimal", tell yourself "good enough" and "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". But I have done this for several projects (enterprise, mission critical systems) and it works just fine. From the developer standpoint I love it. When I yank the "byte array" from the DB I can just pass it right to the client as-is, just adding on the mime type, super simple. Right now I have a system that stores photos of students at a university and we serve those out with an API. All done in C# and SQL Server. We have probably 50,000 photos and it is lighting fast. That being said I have also stored files in S3 and just stored the name in the DB. I will usually rename the file so S3 stores it efficiently. I like things like s3 better than a file system since you can dedicate a bucket just to this and some sysadmin won't go mucking around. I agree with you on storing the unstructured binary data along with your structured data for simplicity. I had a project once that wrote images to a filesystem. Years later older images were lost due to some file system cleanup process. Over my 25 years programming I have found you cannot guess where the issues will be. Don't optimize until you measure it. If you can build a proof of concept then hammer it, do it. Write a script that inserts and reads images and loop it for a few hours. See what happens. Also if you implement something and a few years later it starts to falter, then refactor. But you need to monitor! This is another place where people get bit, they do something like this and just let it run in a corner until it "just dies for no reason" one day. You or someone needs to care and feed for it. I am going to assume on-prem Microsoft SQL Server, your usage may vary. Use "VARBINARY(MAX)" for the field type https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/data-types/binary-and-varbinary-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15 Put it in a table by itself with an id to look it up. Store filename, and filetype(mime-type) too if needed. Slap an index on the id, reference that id in other tables. Critical: Put the table in its own filegroup separate from the other tables. This will allow for faster restores since you can restore the primary filegroup and get your DB back online ASAP, then as it is up and running restore the filegroup with the images. So instead of the whole DB being down for hours, it is up in minutes with only the images being unavailable for hours. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/databases/database-files-and-filegroups?view=sql-server-ver15 As with all DBs the filegroups should not be on the system (C) drive, maybe even put the images table filegroup on its own drive with nothing else. Do set a limit on the incoming filesize in your code. Someone could send in a few Blu-ray ISOs and cripple your system. In .NET code you store the image data in a byte array "byte[] " variable. That byte array is what is stored in the varbinary(max) DB field. It is easy to convert the incoming image/file to byte[], just google around for that there are many easy to do it. Design and implement a cleanup process and purge old unneeded records. No one ever seems to do this and the data grows forever until the system is retired/migrated. For small DBs it's not a problem but for this you must go back to your stakeholder and get in writing when you can delete old records then set an automated process or scheduled manual progress to do it. If they need the data long term maybe older data can be moved out of the online system and to an archive or warehouse. Microsoft has some other methods that I have not used. Check those out. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/blob/binary-large-object-blob-data-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15 -- Good luck More on reddit.com

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