RBS (Remote BLOB Storage)

  • Hi all,

    I'm looking into creating a new database for a fairly large application, which includes a feature for creating and storing many thousands of Word and PDF documents. The application that's being replaced stores the documents in a share on a NAS physically separated from the database server, for performance reasons, but the documents aren't in the database - the database records just include filepath pointers to the documents. Indexing of the documents' contents is done using a 3rd party tool.

    I'd like to have the documents stored in the database as BLOBs, ideally, to allow for more advanced indexing and querying, but from what I'm reading it's only possible to store the documents on a different server than the database if we have the Enterprise edition of MSSQL. Is that correct? If so, that seems a bit ridiculous - who would want to store the files on the same server as the database?

    I've enquired and found that Enterprise edition would be prohibitively expensive for us. If I'm correct that Enterprise edition is the only way to store files off-server, is there a workaround? Has anybody had experience doing this sort of thing before?

  • Have a closer look at the FILESTREAM support and/or FileTable features. They are supported by every edition of SQL Server.

  • Thanks for the reply. I know those features are supported in every edition, but the implication on this page is that FILESTREAM and File Table only support files on the same server as the database except with Enterprise edition.

  • The link you provided goes to the 2008 R2 version. Here's the 2012 version: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg638709.aspx/css. However, it doesn't add much infomation as far as I can see.

    I don't know your storage solution, but we connect our database servers to the SAN via iSCSI which SQL Server sees as local disks.

  • Thanks for that. I did think about using an iSCSI connection, that might well be a way around the problem.

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