I don’t know the following questions are valid here or not. I just hope I get some help from experienced experts here.

I am planning to use MariaDB on 64bit Linux for a new medical application project. I have to store lots of images. The size of one image is about 263KB. There are about 50 images per patient. It’s about 14MB.

I have two options here for these image data:

Option A: store them in file system and have their location linked in database table;

Option B: store them in database in a separated table as BOLB with a unique id;

I know there are lots of implementations go with Option A. My concern about Option A is the security and backup. I have to do them separately.  Do you have any good idea how to do them?

For Option B, I am worry about the size of that table and the database. I read somewhere saying the BOLB and TEXT columns in a table are not stored “inline” and will not be counted to the table size.  Where I can find the detailed information about this?

Oracle has a special way to handle this situation and is pushing save images into database. Is there a similar mechanism in MariaDB?

How about compress a series of images for a patient in Option B? Is it worthy to scarify perform for gaining some spaces?

Eventually the data size will be very big, what are the options for me to cleanup and archive old data, including the image data?

Thanks,

Peter