Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

BLOB Storage in SharePoint

In SharePoint 2003 and the early days of SharePoint 2007, Microsoft SQL Server stored BLOB data in its databases as a rule, as illustrated in Figure 9.15. As a database’s usage increased, the total size of its BLOB data could quickly grow larger than the total size of the document metadata and the other structured data stored in the database. There were no exceptions for this; content metadata and BLOBs had to go into content databases. This was not efficient because Microsoft estimates that as much as 80 percent of the data stored in SharePoint content databases is nonrelational BLOB data, such as Microsoft Office Word documents, Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations. Only ...