wait - context? why? i'm sure you're right, as obviously I wasn't there don't have the clearly important context, but why was it 1000000x harder to maintain if attachments didn't live in mssql?
Not 100% sure of the rationale in this case. I imagine it might have to do with everyone who runs an instance needs to maintain an additional storage system along with all the associated costs, which is not just storage alone.
Databases store stuff really well. If get to the level of needing to configure storage for different tiers of access they can do that, it just takes a bit of work. Of course if your blob data is stored in tables that have OLTP data in them, then you have a bit of work to do to separate it out.
This is speaking from recent experience of having to manage random blobs of sensitive data in s3 buckets that engineers have created rather than bothering to put in the main application data store.
The punchline, I suppose, is that we did switch from MSSQL to Mogile and, eventually, S3. But we still had the code to sometimes store attachments in the DB because that’s how we shipped complete backups to customers!
With no context, but much experience with databases...
Storing attachments as a blob in a database has all sorts of disadvantages I'm sure you're aware of, but it has the major advantage that if you can see the reference to the attachment, you can fetch the attachment. With links to a filesystem, you have to deal with issues like the frontends can't access the files because they're on the wrong system, or the network filesystem is down or .... There's a lot of possibilities.
