InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

New File Storage Mechanism for SQL Server

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Dec 03, 2007

Sections
Development,
Operations & Infrastructure
Topics
.NET ,
SQL Server
Tags
SQL Server 2008

SQL Server was never designed to act as a file system, but many developers use it that way nonetheless. Countless content management systems rely on either shoving large files into blobs or storing filenames. The former has subpar performance while the later requires manually keeping the file system in sync.

SQL Server 2008 seeks to correct this by introducing a filestream option that can be applied to a varbinary(max) column. When used, binary data is stored as files in a private section of a NTFS drive. This offers the performance of a normal file but without the concurrency and backup issues.

The files are created in a folder specified by creating a new FileGroup. In order to link files to rows, each row must contain a GUID column. No explanation was given for why this was necessary in addition to the actual file column.

about time by joey jo jo shabadoo Posted
Re: about time by Brian Lyttle Posted
  1. Back to top

    about time

    by joey jo jo shabadoo

    At least they are trying to address this. I've long been an advocate of keeping binary data out of the database and using the filesystem to um, store files. I've gotten weird looks in the past from Microsoft MVPs and n00bs alike. "Just put it in the database, that's what it's there for, it can handle it!".

  2. Back to top

    Re: about time

    by Brian Lyttle

    At least they are trying to address this. I've long been an advocate of keeping binary data out of the database and using the filesystem to um, store files. I've gotten weird looks in the past from Microsoft MVPs and n00bs alike. "Just put it in the database, that's what it's there for, it can handle it!".


    Well I there are limitations to both approaches. Depending on your needs, a single method of backup/restore may be useful. I think performance concerns can be dealt with in many situations, and you can end up with performance issues on the file system too. As with most things the fault is the people rather than the technology.

Educational Content

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.

Interview: Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.