Yeah, I mean... A database is a place where you want to store stuff that relates to itself somehow.. To each other, the records.. Like, you wanna see that the top 20 somethings are.

You could save image metadata, pdf data, etc.. But the binary data???? (You know that pdfs can store thumbs inside themselves, right? You could code to make sure that such are present.. if not, make them and inject them into the pdf file )

That's more what regular filesystems are for.

Sure, a filesystem itself is a kind of database, it holds stuff - It's great if you know where the stuff is (the regular filesystem I mean ), but when you don't.. a database is great.

Maybe rich731, you're trying to use the database server as a data server? Like, connect accross regular networks to ask 'site a' for thumbnail to 'file x' in 'site c' ?
If so, there could be much better .. expedient ways to do that kind of thing. Like a gool ol' fashioned cgi.