I recently posed a question on stackoverflow on whether anyone knew an efficient way to save an R plot to a MySQL database as a BLOB. My plan was to use my personal desktop to perform R routines and save them to a web server, where they could then be accessed and displayed on a web page using a little PHP magic. After getting numerous responses on what a terrible idea this was, I was able to piece my own solution together. The steps are fairly simple. First, save the plot as a temp file, Second, read it back into R as a binary string. Third, insert the binary text into the database using the RODBC library. The code snippet is below.