Great article. I must admit that we use BLOBs to store data in MS SQL, but the BLOBs (which are documents) are stored in a separate (or many separate) DBs containing just a single table for the BLOBs.

It makes it easier to backup a site if they just need to ensure they have all MS SQL DBs backed up properly. We split the DBs at around 3.5GB or so which makes it easier to archive them as the old ones never change. Performance is great as far as I can tell. Finally, since the data is locked up in a DB, we can better restrict and record who accesses the BLOBs - perfect for medical records. However, as always, the answer is a bit of "it depends..." 😀