When is using MySQL BLOB recommended?

Question

I\'m coding an application that will be uploading and deleting many files, i usually just move the files to a folder in the server naming them with the row unique id

Answer 1

Well, it's a bit old, but this article makes a few decent arguments for BLOB storage: http://www.dreamwerx.net/site/article01.

While not a performance gain per se, having your images and whatnot in a DB as opposed to in a directory should also eliminate problems with hotlinking (assuming this is a web app that's publicly available).