The Art of SQL Server FILESTREAM - Red Gate Software

Chapter 2: Getting Started withFILESTREAMAs we discussed in the previous chapter, FILESTREAM enables you to store BLOB data inthe file system so that you can take advantage of the streaming and caching capabilitiesof NTFS. By accessing the BLOB data using the Win32 streaming APIs exposed by SQLServer 2008, you can offload the processing overhead from SQL Server.In this chapter, we look in detail at how FILESTREAM data is stored, and how you set upa FILESTREAM database, table, and column. We then provide an example of insertingdata into the column.The FILESTREAM Data ContainerSQL Server stores the FILESTREAM data in a file system folder which is known as theFILESTREAM data container. Each FILESTREAM-enabled database must have its ownunique data container. The location of the FILESTREAM data container is specified whenyou create a FILESTREAM-enabled database or when you enable FILESTREAM on anexisting database.SQL Server creates a number of subfolders in the data container to manage theFILESTREAM data; a folder is created for each table, with one or more FILESTREAMcolumns. If a table is partitioned, a folder is created for each partition. Within the folderfor each table or partition, a subfolder is created for each of the FILESTREAM-enabledcolumns, to store the BLOB data.48