>I can't help feeling that that's a bit of a generalisation?
>I can think of many cases where storing images as standalone files would not be optimal.
>And what are the downsides of using varbinary ?
>
>I hate to use the words "best practice", but I can tell you that the generally recommended practice is to store the images outside the database. It makes it a bit easier to swap images when they change.
>
>Securing the network area is a no-brainer.
That's only true if you (and only you) have the requisite OS access and permissions. Even then it's not simple to achieve as part of a standard installation process. And even if you do that to solve the security problem there may still, depending on the app, be potential issues with concurrency.

But (leaving aside the FILESTREAM option) did you look at the white paper here :http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64525
Their conclusion seemed to be that for image sizes sub 256Kb varbinary was 'a clear winner' and only above 1Mb was that true for a standalone file strategy ?

>
>Yes, FileStream is an option, I didn't see (one way or another) if Kevin's client was using SQL 2008.
Don't know either. But was I right in thinking that a standard SQL server backup would also backup the filesystem based data ?