"Guy Rouillier" <guyr@masergy.com> writes:
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
>> External storing is useful but I prefer LO because all my data (binary
>> and meta) is all in the same place for management.
>
> But if that's a big L in LO, performance and maintenance will be
> negatively affected, perhaps significantly. The DBMS will have to scan
> over all that large binary data to extract text or numeric data. And
> backups will copy that static binary data repeatedly. For those
> reasons, if I'm storing very large objects, like images, that I know
> I'll never search or update, I prefer to manage them externally.
Large objects (and reasonably large text/bytea columns as well) are
stored out-of-line, so normal table scans don't have to read them
unnecessarily.
-Doug