If going for oracle, take a look at dbfs and Secure Files. Secure Files says it all, keep ALL your data safe in the database. It is organized in lobs. Secure Files is a modernized version of lobs, that should be activated. dbfs is a filesystem in the database. You can mount it similar like a network filesystem, on a Linux host. It is real powerful. See [blog][1] It also has a lot of options to tune to your specific needs. Being a dba, given a filesystem (based in the database, mounted on Linux), a created an Oracle Database on it without any problems. (a database, stored in a ... database). Not that this would be very useful but it does show the power. More advantages are: availability, backup, recovery, all read consistent with the other relational data. [1]: http://ronr.blogspot.com/2010/06/dbfs-is-great.html