Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

New and Improved Storage Features

SQL Server 2012 provides a few new features related to data storage, primarily intended to improve performance.

SQL Server 2012 provides an enhancement to FILESTREAM storage by allowing more than one filegroup to be used to store FILESTREAM data. This can improve I/O performance and scalability for FILESTREAM data by providing the ability to store the data on multiple drives. FILESTREAM storage, which was introduced in SQL Server 2008, integrates the SQL Server Database Engine with the NTFS file system, providing a means for storing unstructured data (such as documents, images, and videos) with the database storing a pointer to the data. Although the actual data resides outside the database in the NTFS file system, ...