Kevin,
>I'd argue that it certainly *does* belong there - just that the option isn't well supported :-}
>
>Well, I've seen several companies that have stated specific reasons why they wanted to keep them external (reasons ranging from flexibility to system issues I described earlier) - I have yet to see or hear any stated requirement/reason to keep them in the database.

while the technical points mentioned earlier are valid, IMHO nowadays the issue mostly revolves around the need to have a secure, backupped or even change/audit/trailable history for things like [document] images. And the cost of added time for backup and backup capacitiy will be probably even higher than the initial cost of SQL disk space you cited.

A PDF document or even BMP received via email might give trouble in a tax audit for instance.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas