Summary

SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().

Furthermore, a single SQLite database holding 10-kilobyte blobs uses about 20% less disk space than storing the blobs in individual files.

The performance difference arises (we believe) because when working from an SQLite database, the open() and close() system calls are invoked only once, whereas open() and close() are invoked once for each blob when using blobs stored in individual files. It appears that the overhead of calling open() and close() is greater than the overhead of using the database. The size reduction arises from the fact that individual files are padded out to the next multiple of the filesystem block size, whereas the blobs are packed more tightly into an SQLite database.

The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05 using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0. You may expect future versions of SQLite to perform even better.

Read in full here:

https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

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