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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T18:46:32+00:00

I have a c++ app that generates 6x relatively small image-like integer arrays per

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I have a c++ app that generates 6x relatively small image-like integer arrays per second. The data is 64x48x2-dimensional int (ie, a grid of 64×48 two-dimensional vectors, with each vector consisting of two floats). That works out to ~26kb per image. The app also generates a timestamp and some features describing the data. I want to store the timestamp and the features in a MySQL db column, per frame. I also need to store the original array as binary data, either in a file on disc or as a blob field in the database. Assume that the app will be running more or less nonstop, and that I’ll come up with a way to archive data older than a certain age, so that storage does not become a problem.

What are the tradeoffs here for blobs, files-on-disc, or other methods I may not even be thinking of? I don’t need to query against the binary data, but I need to query against the other metadata/features in the table (I’ll definitely have an index built against timestamp), and retrieve the binary data. Does the equation change if I store multiple frames in a single file on disk, vs. one frame per file?

Yes, I’ve read MySQL Binary Storage using BLOB VS OS File System: large files, large quantities, large problems and To Do or Not to Do: Store Images in a Database, but I think my question differs because in this case there are going to be millions of identically-dimensioned binary files. I’m not sure how the performance hit to maintaining that many small files in a filesystem compares to storing that many files in db blob columns. Any perspective would be appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    At a certain point, querying for many blobs becomes unbearably slow. I suspect that even if your identically dimensioned binary files this will be the case. Moreover you will still need some code to access and process the blobs. And this doesn’t take advantage of file caching that might speed up image queries straight from the file system.

    But! The link you provided did not mention object based databases, which can store the data you described in a way that you can access it extremely quickly, and possibly return it in native format. For a discussion see the link or just search google, there are many discussions:

    Storing images in NoSQL stores

    I would also look into HBase.

    I figured since you were not sure about what to use in the first place(and there were no answers), an alternative solution might be appropriate.

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