From a general security point of view, I think it is inadvisable to have the database point to a file in the filesystem and then allowing the user access to your filesystem to retrieve the file. It could lead to all kinds of nasty problems.

Also as database-engines are (should?) be optimised to retrieve data from their storage, I fail to see if it would be more efficient to first retrieve from the database the pointer to the file in your filesystem and then by a totally different process get the file itself.

Or am I missing something obvious here?

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law