I thank everyone who have contributed to this question.

I really appreciate your inputs.

I have come to the conclusion that I will create a separate table for
storing all images so if anything does go wrong the precious data is
not affected. I am also thinking of converting/encode each document
to Base64 and store in FB. Hope this approach will not have any
problems? If anyone has got any other insight on this please do help
me out.

Aage Johansen :

> 3. "Can Firebird handle such huge binary data efficiently?"
> Well. I currently have a few million images (in tiff) in files with
> references/pointers (server/folder/filename) in the database. The
> files/folders are organized in different ways because of the source
> system for the images - which is a pain. Now, I intend to move them
> all into one single database. Estimated size will be around
> 250GB. Looking forward to having the new disks installed in a SAN,
> and getting ready to move the image files into the
> blobs. Preliminary tests did not reveal any problems with loading
> the db, backup/restore of the db, or retrieving data.

This info is truly amazing. You are running FB on which OS? Coz. I
have never been able to create such huge files in Windows XP till
date. I do video editing at home, as hobby. But Adobe Premier just
never seems to create files larger than 4 GB so I have to split a
long video in chuncks of 4 GB.

Forgive me for my ignorance but what is SAN?

Reagrding speed I have felt from the first day that I started
experimenting on FB that whenever I run my testing software for the
first time FB seems to take a bit longer to server data but after
this single delay everything seems to work well and data comes in a
ziffy!. By the way our company's Data Server is Intel C2D with 2 GB
RAM and 2x 160 GB HDDs and our LAN is just of 30 nodes.

Thank you all for your tips, hints, scoldings and guidence.

Yogi Yang