Some interesting updates on SQL Server 2008. FILESTREAM allows you to store large unstructured data items (BLOBS) outside the database in the native filesystem. This is really handy as the BLOB no longer impacts the database itself for either performance or reliability.
However there are a couple of things to be aware of as Database mirroring and Snapshots aren’t supported. Otherwise, FILESTREAM is implemented as a varbinary(max) and can be used as if it were a normal but importantly it is not limited to 2GB in size, rather to volume size (although thats no a good measure). A cool capability is thta you can access the FILESYSTEM onject directly from the Win32 API, you can’t delete or rename and object but you can read and write to it. However NTFS security is applied and by default only the SQL Server Service has access permissions.
