>I believe the general consensus around here is to not do that, if you can avoid it. File systems are much better equipped to handle files of that magnitude, especially when it comes to retrieving them, scanning >through their contents, or really, any access pattern aside from simple storage.
>
>You're better off storing the blob on disk somewhere and storing a row that refers to its location. Either key pieces for a naming scheme or the full path.
>
>This is especially true if you mean to later access that data with PHP.
>
>--
>Shaun Thomas
Using files stored outside the database creates all sorts of problems. For starters you lose ACID guaranties. I would prefer to keep them in database. We did a lot of experiments with Large Objects and they really worked fine (stored hundreds of LOBs ranging from a few MB up to 1GB). Postgres does a really good job with Large Objects. If it was not the pg_dump problem I would not hesitate to use LOBs.