alt Hacker NewsThe primary reason to avoid doing so is avoiding thrashing your buffers, along with increased size of backups, WAL bloat, etc.
Can you? Yes. Should you? Not at anything beyond a toy scale, unless you want to pay for more RAM to ensure that your normal OLTP queries don’t take a performance hit.
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Listen to this advice.
I had a system that has ~600gb of blob data in bytea that could have easily been an S3 bucket + db reference. It made backups way more of a pain than necessary.
It was intentional in the design, because I wanted total consistency with a single backup for the system. It worked great for years. But as we got more and more clients, it really should have been migrated to the above design to make sure our backups could be taken / restored faster.
Agreed. Even putting them on the filesystem and rsyncing in a cronjob would be better, which says a lot.