Storing Documents And Images - In The Database Or As A Link?

Hi There,

Being quite new to MS-SQL I would like to ask if there is a general opinion
of what approach should be taken to storing things like external documents
and images in databases.

Should the actual files be stored within the database, or instead should
links to the files on a file server or something similar be stored instead.

For the end user I imagine it is easier to have everything stored within the
database, because doing it the other way in effect gives another level of
management because there is the need to perhaps manually look after the file
server with all the image files or document files on.

In my particular case, I am building a database where the users use a great
many Word documents. For example, I particular record might have a number of
different Word documents associated with it.

I was going to create a "Documents" table that all documents were stored in
(including meta data about each document because it will be really useful to
be able to search for documents so that they can be reused).

In this table I was in a dilemma as to whether to actually store the
documents in the table. Other then the performance hit and memory
requirements this will require, are there any other disadvantages?

What are the general thoughts when a database needs to manage a lot of pdf
and word documents?

Thanks in advance.

Dave.