WHY would someone do this in real life? What's a reason someone would save the file into the database instead of to their hard drive or server and making a simple reference to it? Does mysql dish out files quicker?

I'd say it is a tradeoff between convenient access (especially if the data is updated from time to time) and performance (which will suffer -- mysql does not dish out files quicker than you can read it directly). For example you can access data in a database from clients on a different server, whereas a file on a local disk can only be accessed locally (setting up a network share is of course an alternative, too).

In reply to Re: literally saving a file inside a database by Thilosophy
in thread literally saving a file inside a database by Anonymous Monk

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