Posted by Richard Levasseur on 07/08/06 01:27

David T. Ashley wrote:
> "Richard Levasseur" <richardlev@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1152301909.936208.193410@m79g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > romayankin@gmail.com wrote:
> >> I'm making some kind of news-board site on PHP (tthat's why I guess
> >> it's the right place to post the question here). Each entry would
> >> have a small picture (less then 100kb). Taking into consideration all
> >> pros and cons the question is where to store these pictures in DB or in
> >> files?
> >
> > Files. You can link to them in an <img> tag easier, don't have to
> > write code to extract the image and send the appropriate headers, and
> > can easily view/modify/ them using ftp/samba/etc. Store a path to the
> > file in the database instead.
>
> Depending on how many files you plan to accumulate, it is traditional to use
> a directory structure where you keep the file in a directory whose path
> components are the file index moduli of different prime numbers. For
> example, choose 2, 3, and 5 as the prime numbers, then
>
> File #1 goes in 1/1/1/1/filename.
> File #2 goes in 0/2/2/2/filename.
> File #3 goes in 1/0/3/3/filename.
> File #4 goes in 0/1/4/4/filename.
> File #5 goes in 1/2/0/5/filename.
> File #n goes in (n mod 2)/(n mod 3)/(n mod 5/n/filename.
>
> As long as you choose different prime numbers, you won't get the same hashed
> directory until a period which is the product of the primes.
>
> The moduli are cheap to compute for a computer.
>
> Files are the superior way. In addition to all other advantages, if
> something goes monstrously wrong on the server or in the database product,
> the files can be recovered separate from the database.
>
> Dave.

Another option would be to name the file after the primary key, or
other unique index, of the table.

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