Question

I’m going to be saving images into an SQL Database (don’t know what type to use there), and I’m going to query the DB for an image of a students portrait shot.

What variable type should I use to store this image?

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace Nana_s_Student_Gradebook
{
    class Student
    {
        public string name { get; set; }
        public string lastName { get; set; }
        public byte[] picture { get; set; }
        public DateTime dateOfBirth { get; set; }
    }
}

Any guidance please? 🙂

Answer 1

In your .NET code, you’ll probably want to use System.Drawing.Image or a derived class. Ultimately, you’ll have to stream those bytes out to SQL Server one way or another, but you don’t need to use a byte array from the beginning. All picture related types in .NET offer some kind of streaming support.

On the SQL Server side, by all means, use a VARBINARY(MAX) type – it’s binary, it’s up to 2 GB in size, it’s fast, it’s perfect for that use case. Up to an average image size of about 1 MB, this is probably your best bet – even better than using the SQL Server 2008 FILESTREAM attribute (which is great if you have lots of really really large images, larger than 1 MB on a regular basis; here, the binary file is itself stored in the server machine’s file system under database control).