Although related to this question, I have a slightly different angle to approach this issue from. Here is my situation:
I am writing a web application (either in PHP or Python) that manages addons for a desktop application. Users can browse addons, install them, upload them, etc.
I am planning the schema for the database and found myself with a decision to make:
Is it better to store icons (for the addons) in the table itself or instead store them in the filesystem and simply store a filename in the table?
The icons are small (48x48 or close to that) and likely won't take up more than 5 or 6 KB at the most. Are there any serious drawbacks to storing the image data in the table? Are there other implications that I should be aware of? Will performance be a concern? Will storage be an issue?
Edit: I am currently looking at MyISAM tables in a MySQL database.