Blobbing data ... : Upload to folder instead of database.

Hello everyone,

I'm running the 'Blobbing data with PHP & MySQL' script on my server and everything works fine.

The bad thing about this script is that now i have a database with too much data since all files are encoded in the database . My database is like 15 Mb now ...

What i'd like to do is the following : Instead of storing the file in the database, i just want to store an unique filename and store the actual file in a folder /uploads for exemple on my server. The database would only contain filename, description, sender and so on ... no binary data.

Anyone done/tried this before ?

Any replies are welcome, thanks !!

Michael

Absolutely. I got my hands on this project where the old programmer was storing everything from large, high-res images to quicktime panoramas (1/2 MB each) in the database. That was above and beyond the fact most of the website's content was database driven. Given a few dozen thousands page views with simultaneous user uploads and the database ground to a halt.

Since changing file names was a major faux pas on this project, I used mkdir to create new directories for each upload. Then, used move_uploaded_file to upload the file while at the same time copying the dynamically created path and storing both it and the filename in the database.

For security, I used a combination of placing the uploads directory outside the main httpdocs directory (so visitors couldn't directly source the files) and Apache authentication so only the server could access the directory.

When I want to call an image in a webpage, I just piece together the path stored in the database. The size of the db fell by about 80% and everything is working much, much faster.

Just because you can BLOB doesn't mean you should