I want to point out here that the comments here in general were not conducive to giving out information. Your comment (shown below) was dismissive so there was

I want to point out here that the comments here in general were not conducive to giving out information. Your comment (shown below) was dismissive so there was no way I was going to elaborate. I recommend that if you are skeptical about something that you ask questions about it and we can discuss it more not simply dismiss it as "anti pattern". I would never talk/comment the way if I wanted to learn from others. Point of my original comment got lost because of this "binary data in rdbms is anti pattern" detour. It was the least important thing that several people wanted to zero in and pile on. > "Congratulations, you’ve offloaded to your app what your database is designed to deal with. Storing all data as binary is an anti-pattern too, regardless of your qps. I wouldn’t store anything but metadata in the database, the blob can be somewhere like S3." > If you find you want to filter on one of those fields now, do you run a reindexing and update operation on a few trillion? rows (guess that might happen regardless though). And also my comment above answered this filtering question from the get-go which underscores this distraction detour: "Sometimes I may need higher performance or more dynamic queries, so just creating a table or elastic search with only indexable values to get the ids works. Use those IDs to fetch from original store." Let's be honest questions like "how to structure your tables", "how to make your datastore operations more efficient" (non exhaustive list, seems I need to point that out) veers on consulting, which is typically paid for so of course comments on the topic will have less information than you would like. Skeptics, who make blanket assertions, will usually be disregarded. Some may be willing to divulge and others may not be.