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Asked: 2026-05-25T18:11:38+00:00

Which is the best way to insert a font in a SQL Server database,

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Which is the best way to insert a font in a SQL Server database, while knowing that this font can accessed from different environments (Windows/Linux) and languages (Java/PHP/Python/C#)?

I have a case where I should insert a Font from a C# Winforms application and get this font from Java application, and currently I’m inserting Font.Name, Font.Style and Font.Size and from Java I’m retrieving the font using Font.Decode(); method.

And it works in many cases, but I thought it might be better to transfer the font file to the database and get the font file .ttf from the database by associating a custom constructed string to identify the font with its associated file.

eg: Font Name, Font Size and Font Style + Font File, because sometimes that font is not installed or has a different name on another system (font is very important in my case).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s a really good paper by Microsoft Research called To Blob or Not To Blob.

    Their conclusion after a large number of performance tests and analysis is this:

    • if your pictures or document are typically below 256K in size, storing them in a database VARBINARY column is more efficient

    • if your pictures or document are typically over 1 MB in size, storing them in the filesystem is more efficient (and with SQL Server 2008’s FILESTREAM attribute, they’re still under transactional control and part of the database)

    • in between those two, it’s a bit of a toss-up depending on your use

    If you decide to put your pictures into a SQL Server table, I would strongly recommend using a separate table for storing those pictures – do not store the employee foto in the employee table – keep them in a separate table. That way, the Employee table can stay lean and mean and very efficient, assuming you don’t always need to select the employee foto, too, as part of your queries.

    For filegroups, check out Files and Filegroup Architecture for an intro. Basically, you would either create your database with a separate filegroup for large data structures right from the beginning, or add an additional filegroup later. Let’s call it “LARGE_DATA”.

    Now, whenever you have a new table to create which needs to store VARCHAR(MAX) or VARBINARY(MAX) columns, you can specify this file group for the large data:

     CREATE TABLE dbo.YourTable
     (....... define the fields here ......)
     ON Data                   -- the basic "Data" filegroup for the regular data
     TEXTIMAGE_ON LARGE_DATA   -- the filegroup for large chunks of data

    Check out the MSDN intro on filegroups, and play around with it!

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