>Dear All,
>
>We are developing an application using MySQL as the back-end and Visual Foxpro 9.0 as the front-end.
>Since the application must run on different locations in the world we think of accessing the data on a server using TCP/IP via a public IP address.
>The main table in the database should be able to grow to 10.000.000 records.
>In this table there are 3 images saved per record (average 50k per image).
>Does anybody know if it would be a better idea to save the pictures separately outside of the database and only save the names of the pictures in the database or should the pictures be in the database record itself (so this table could grow to around 2 terabytes)?
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>Koos Veel.

I would say that storing the pictures as separate files would be the best solution. Personally I store about 6 million pictures in a directory tree, and all the pictures have numeric, 8 digits, names. I have created 9 directories named 1 to 9, and each directory has 10 subdirectories, named 0 to 9. So picture 12345678.jpg goes into directory 1\2, picture 34567890.gif goes into 3\4 and so on. Dividing the pictures into several subdirectories is significantly faster than storing them all in one directory. In my table, I have one C(8) field for the picture names, the extension I find programmatically. I have made a simple UDF to find the path to the pictories.