> Image description: 2-page tiff aprox. size 24k
> Current image count: 25,550,000
> Daily addition: 7,000 +-
>

Ouch, thats huge.

> Questions:
>
> 1. If the image files/blobs were stored separate from the data in
> their
> own table, would there be an impact on overall database performance?

Assuming that the images themselves were seldom modified after being
inserted (which is probably the case), keeping the blobs in a
different table would improve performance as modifying another field
in a record would not require duplicating a BLOB.

In any database where BLOBs are used extensively in a MGA database,
your application would need to manage transactions very carefully.
Otherwise you end up like the poor bloke the other day who grew his
database over 10 times what he expected.

Helen made a detailed post the other day about how BLOBs are stored
(related to that other problem), so read that carefully. You would
want to make sure the size of the BLOB was set such that you do not
waste space on BLOB pages.

> 2. Can Firebird handle this volume of data?

What does that work out to be, 600GB of images + db storage overhead.
This is way out of my experience, maybe someone else can share their
experiences with such a large DB.

By the way, what file system issues are you worried about? Maximum
files in a directory or something else? If it is simply a maximum
directory size / files in directory based limitation, you could
design your own folder structure around it.

Adam