( 1. Sent this mail few days ago to Monty but no answer yet. I know, he is busy man. 2. I use name "MySQL" because this is real name for me. Oracle still sucks:P ) Hi! We all have seen cases where people try to use SQL for something what does not fit there. Reason is simple - file system itself is very good database for some type of objects and queries. One common MySQL usage scenario is web portal. Often portal has some sort of news and photos accompanying it. My idea is to make some sort of clever way to store images within MySQL making their read/write as fast as possible and meanwhile giving extra value to user who shouldn't care about data integrity keeping data in and out of SQL coherent. Also would be cool to get all required data with single query. I think best way to implement this is to introduce field type "file" which is stored outside of usual data storage. Only his physical location on disk is stored in MyISAM or similar. This is exactly same as people keep file name in CHAR currently but we provide method to fetch file contents with same query. Also we can implement cool replication to keep same file on all servers consistent, way to backup things via mysqldump etc.... Actually idea is bit wider but what you think generally? Tõnu