Nice article. I have always used your blog to find answers to most of my sql questions.

I have a question on the filestream backup.

If am not mistaken, FileStream backup does a backup of the data as well as the filesystem managed under the filestream. So in essence as the number of files keeps growing, the time to do a complete backup and then to a complete restore would keep growing.

What would be the right approach then if i anticipate my files to keep growing as part of document management. Even if i do a partial backup and just backup the data and the filesytem seperately; it would essentially boil down to method 1 of storing on filesystem and then storing the pointer in the database

Please let me know your thoughts. The concept of filestream is good, but there is hardly any mention about backups and restore from a practical stand point.

Thanx
Sunil

File Stream is only works with Integrated Security ?

Consider it as bad as modifying the mdf/ldf files. SQL Server does not allow you to modify them when the server is up and running because the files are exclusively opened by SQL Server. In the case of FILESTREAM data, SQL Server opens a filestream data file only when needed. It does not open all the files and keeps a handle open, as it will be a huge wastage of resources.

FILESTREAM data is supposed to be accessed though TSQL or through the API exposed by SQL Server. When the data is accessed through these methods, the permissions set by the SQL Administrator comes into picture and that is the security part you mentioned in the post.

In a real-world environment, a windows server administrator (not sql administrator) might protect the filestream folder against unauthorized ‘direct-harmful-access’.

I have to come know that security of the files saved on the local drive using Filestream is managed by the sql server itself.

When i delete the the file from NTFS , it allowed me to delete the file. but when i executed the query SELECT * FROM dbo.FileStreamTable
it given me the error

Msg 233, Level 20, State 0, Line 0
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 – No process is on the other end of the pipe.)

Why the file was deleted from the local path (instead it should be deleted from sql server because the security was managed by FileStream)

Regards

Did FILESTREAM supports replication

I am designing a database for an application that stores 20000 images (100-200K each).

For one the recommendation is not to use FILESTREAM if the file size is smaller than 250K, but on the other side I have 20000 images a day which would require tons of DB size….

So now is the question should those images be saved as a varbinary(max) blob or should we use the FILESTREAM attribute?

Images are not accessed frequently after they were saved.

Thanks,
Wolf

i would like to extract all DB resident images and force to a certain height/width as part of the XML extraction.

i know there are many ways to do this with but we would like to keep it internal to the DB query if possible.

thanks

Do i have any performance gain if i create my table containing large binary data into separate file group.

I have a question.

Can we ALTER database with FILESTREAM option?
Please let me know.

Thanks,

Also, FILESTREAM data can be stored in a compressed disk volume as well. FILESTREAM data can be used in FULL Text Indexing and can be used in replication as well as log shipping.

However, you cannot do database mirroring on a database that uses FILESTREAM feature.

Once your server starts noticing the load, you need to add another database server. That can happen quicker than you think. If you store images in the filesystem, you can just add a light weight web server that’s responsible for serving only images. You can even offload the images to a CDN.

Another disadvantage is the relatively longer connections you keep in your databases. Unless the database does some prefetching to memory, you would need to keep that connection open while the user downloads the file. And if the database prefetches the image into memory, it will increase the memory requirements of your database server.

Thanks

K.K.B