From the Spindrop blog, there's a quick new post that shares the code needed to save a file to a database inside of a symfony application:

I like to save content uploaded by website visitors to a database versus the file system. It makes it easy having the data all in one spot. I tend to overcomplicate this process, so I wanted to write down the important steps.

His two step process involves modifying your application's form helper and the code to pull the binary data out of the submit and push it into a new object.