  Application designers often face the question of whether to store large
objects in a filesystem or in a database. Often this decision is made for
application design simplicity. Sometimes, performance measurements are also
used. This paper looks at the question of fragmentation - one of the
operational issues that can affect the performance and/or manageability of the
system as deployed long term. As expected from the common wisdom, objects
smaller than 256KB are best stored in a database while objects larger than 1M
are best stored in the filesystem. Between 256KB and 1MB, the read:write ratio
and rate of object overwrite or replacement are important factors. We used the
notion of "storage age" or number of object overwrites as way of normalizing
wall clock time. Storage age allows our results or similar such results to be
applied across a number of read:write ratios and object replacement rates.
