How can I store Image file in database?

Question

Is there any way to store image in database? I am using MS SQL and I wanna store image file or other file type. Can I store image file directly to database or store just string to describe the location of the image file? Thank you for viewing my questions and I hope I will get good solutions soon. :-)

Akshay Phadke · Answer

These are quite useful articles http://www.aspsnippets.com/Articles/How-to-save-insert-Image-in-Database-in-ASPNet-using-C-and-VBNet.aspx http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/ca2535/how-to-upload-images-and-save-the-images-into-database-using/ http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/e628d9/inserting-retrieving-images-from-sql-server-database-without-using-stored-procedures/

Ravi Patel · Answer

Hi refer this link http://www.aspdotnet-suresh.com/2011/01/how-to-insert-images-into-database-and.html

Brij Saroj · Answer

There's a useful feature in Microsoft SQL Server (at least since 2008 R2 maybe before) called FILESTREAM. Read this page for introduction if you're not familiar with it: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895234%28v=sql.130%29.aspx It allows you to save the actual data to disk without worrying about keeping it synchronized with other data in the DB because you'll only access the data through MSSQL itself. It seems other people have been using this approach for saving images for a long time. See this post from 2010 about images in database: https://support.leadtools.com/SupportPortal/CS/forums/34913/ShowPost.aspx

Ranjit Kanojia · Answer

Greetings Ranjit I have some experience storing documents in SQL Server 2008 usng FileStreaming. It takes a bit of configuring and the code is a bit different than regular SQL but it works well. Having both the ability to use streaming to read and write to the files and having the transaction support of SQL Server is great! If you can use Sql Server 2008 R2 consider that. If you wish to use Snapshot Isolation AND FileStreaming on the same database it's only supported in this version. We are preparing to put this into production. One disadvantage of this approach is that while the files are externally accessible you still have to query SQL to get the information to access them so you can't just have the file server serve the images directly. There's another project Im involved in that will be solely images... The number of images and sizing of the system are such that putting them into SQL Server isn't really an option. On top of that we are building this in the cloud using Windows Azure. SQL Azure doesn't have support for file streaming as of yet. Good luck to you.