Question

I manage a support team which collects license information from various workplaces (construction, real estate, insurance, etc). In an effort to ensure employees are properly licensed and to inform them when their license is set to expire, we have chosen to store the “effective date” range in a MySQL table. Format would look as follows:

ID  | personID | startDate  | endDate
========================================
1   |  111     | 2013-01-01 | 2014-01-01
2   |  222     | 2012-11-05 | 2012-12-31

This part is easy but we are also considering storing a copy of the license we receive from the individual either in the cloud (Amazon S3 likely) or directly into the mysql table by base_64 encoding it in place of keeping on in-house pc’s. The license can come in the form of a scanned image (jpg, png) or document form (likely PDF only).

Is one method better than another necessarily?

Answer 1

Some S3 pros:

• MySQL Backup size remains manageable
• Database or hosting adjustments can be made independently of file storage
• If done correctly, files may be uploaded directly to an S3 bucket reducing load on your servers

Some S3 drawbacks:

• If these are searchable PDFs will you ever want to full text search?
• S3 files must be explicitly deleted (vs. a simple row delete)