Dealing with the U in CRUD - full vs delta updates

If you have "truckloads" of fields, with images in the db or something enormous like that, perhaps you should refactor your schema into tables of each enormous field (or even just shove it in the file system), and store the relations in a relational database, with the entities stored somewhere else.

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 :)