{
  "id": 6100672,
  "title": "Why You Shouldn’t Store Large Files in Your Database: Database vs. Amazon S3",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/07/why-you-shouldnt-store-large-files-in-your-database-database-vs",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-07T05:05:15.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/ammar_eyad/why-you-shouldnt-store-large-files-in-your-database-database-vs-amazon-s3-hec"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "When your application grows, storing files directly in a database can create two major issues: first, it becomes challenging to use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) effectively. With S3 and a CDN, files like images and videos can be cached at various locations worldwide. This allows users to retrieve files from nearby servers, improving speed and reducing load on the application. However, storing files as binary large objects (BLOBs) in a database eliminates this benefit. Every file request now requires hitting the web server, which then queries the database to fetch the binary data, a process that slows down the speed and increases costs associated with the database.\n\nSecondly, having large files in a database complicates database replication. Typically, replicas help ensure high availability, especially for structured data. But when databases store massive amounts of images, videos, and documents, these files become part of the replication workload. This means that not only user data like orders, products, and payments are replicated, but also hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of media files. Consequently, backups and restorations of such databases become significantly heavier processes, consuming more time and resources.\n\nMoreover, storing large files in a database can unnecessarily increase the size of the database. Databases excel at managing structured data, relationships, transactions, queries, and indexes. However, storing large files is a distinct problem that object storage is designed to handle. By separating responsibilities, databases can focus on structured data, while S3 or object storage can manage large files. This separation leads to cleaner architecture, easier CDN integration, and improved scalability. It also prevents your primary database from acting as a file server, which can be inefficient and costly.",
  "summary": "Storing files in a database instead of S3 introduces two massive architectural bottlenecks as your application scales: 1. CDN becomes much harder to use One of the biggest advantages of S3 is how easily it works with a CDN such as Amazon CloudFront or Cloudflare. Imagine you have millions of users requesting the same images. With S3 and a CDN, the CDN can cache those images at locations around…",
  "key_points": [
    "Storing large files directly in a database hinders CDN effectiveness.",
    "Large files in a database complicate replication and backups.",
    "Separating structured data from large files improves scalability."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}