I have used both techniques whilst working with oracle database.

And it all comes down to the scenario. But generally I want to keep my data
in as few places as possible, for security reasons, and for availability
reasons. And it is nothing complicated about storing a binary file in a BLOB
field in the database. You can still read it while working with datasets.. it
is serialized and encoded using Base64. And I do't like to store paths in
database, becuase then you create a depencence between the file system and
the application. And this is not good from an architectural point of view.

Of course when you need a third party application to access the file, then
perhaps the best choice would be to store the file in a shared folder. If it
can't be solved in any other way.. I always consider file systems as a last
resort...

but thats just me ;) Im no MVP or MCAD...

kind regards
Henrik