Move attachments data to its own table?

[Joel Peshkin]

As far as I know, I have the largest attachments table of any bugzilla 
installation.  That means that I am your future.

It seems that all accesses to the attachments table are very slow just 
because of the huge amount of data in the table.  To date, we have been 
adding indexes to keep most operations from needing to actually access 
the row data.

Rather than continuing this, I wonder if we should leave all the 
metadata (filename, mime-type, submitter, ceration timestamp, etc...) in 
the attachments table but migrate the actual attachment data (the 
"thedata" field) to its own table containing only attach_id and 
thedata.   I don't see any disadvantage of doing this and it could save 
a lot of trouble.

Anybody have any opinions about this?

-Joel