To BLOB or Not To BLOB: Large Object Storage in a Database or a Filesystem?
ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2006-45.pdf a paper from microsoft research comparing perfomance of 2 systems: metadata in db + files in fs vs. meatadata + files as blobs in db. Study uses MSSQL and NTFS. Datasets are in less than 1 GB size.