Good article. I have a 3rd party app which will begin using the FILESTREAM attribute in the next major release, and this article gives me a good overview of how it works. I just have one question:
Even though you can access these files if you have required permissions, these files cannot be directly deleted or renamed using the file system. Otherwise the link-level consistency will be lost between the database and the file system as a result of this the database might get corrupted.
For clarification, is it that the files cannot(a) or should not(b) be deleted or renamed? In other words, does SQL Server or Windows actually prevent you from renaming or deleting the files (a), or can you do it, but there will be dire consequences (b)?