[ovokinder]

You did establish a good point with placing the photos/binary objects on separate tables, but take for instance the Contact/AddressBook example: almost 100% of the times I'm fetching a Contact from the database, I also want the picture to serve it to a client, so putting it on a separate table would force the RDBMS to an avoidable extra effort.

My DB spiritual advisor tells me the rule of thumb is <= 500KB -> DB, > 500KB -> filesystem. I'll have to test performance of storing the binary stuff outside of the DB.

PS: By "truckloads" I mean tables with anything over 10 fields. I hate god tables/objects :)