Is there a good reason to store big text data outside database? I was analyzing my MySQL database performance and found that tables containing text fields are just huge, larger than 1Gb.

This data is only used when loading single record (like article or blog post) and is updated very rarely.

Is there a reason to save text data to plain files and metadata to database, or let the db engine handle it all?
You might want to consider moving the data outside the database if:


You are having problems with backup durations
It causes disk or network throughput problems on your database server
You have a requirement to access the data without using the database


In general, I'd suggest keeping it in the database unless you can come up with a good reason not to.

There's some overlap between this question and "Files - in the database or not?". You might find some useful thoughts there, though things that are true for binary files don't necessarily hold true for text data.

MySQL offers some useful features where text is stored in the database, such as opportunities to use full-text indexing, and network compression.