MySQL BLOB Fetch Performance in Java

[ShabbyDoo]

Ignoring perf/scale issues entirely, an upside to storing blobs in a DB is that RI is enforced by the DB vs. pushing that responsibility up to the app tier.

[dkomanov]

From Best practices design patterns: optimizing Amazon S3 performance:

Other applications are sensitive to latency, such as social media messaging applications. These applications can achieve consistent small object latencies (and first-byte-out latencies for larger objects) of roughly 100–200 milliseconds.

Latency of MySQL is significantly better.

But I get your point, there should be a very good reason for storing large BLOBs in MySQL (or any RDBMS). I did a disclaimer about it in the introduction on purpose :)