Happy Programming

What is FILESTREAM?

FILESTREAM is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2008 which provides an efficient storage and management option for BLOB data.

Many applications that deal with BLOB data today stores them in the file system and stores the path to the file in the relational tables. Storing BLOB data in the file system is more efficient that storing them in the database. However, this brings up a few disadvantages as well. When the BLOB data is stored in the file system, it is hard to ensure transactional consistency between the file system data and relational data.

Some applications store the BLOB data within the database to overcome the limitations mentioned earlier. This approach ensures transactional consistency between the relational data and BLOB data, but is very bad in terms of performance.

FILESTREAM combines the benefits of both approaches mentioned above without the disadvantages we examined. FILESTREAM stores the BLOB data in the file system (thus takes advantage of the IO Streaming capabilities of NTFS) and ensures transactional consistency between the BLOB data in the file system and the relational data in the database.