Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

With the covers coming off the SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) I have been looking at how this may impact on SharePoint.   When we first started to introduce WSS v2/SPS 2003 there was often comments from people:

“You store the documents in SQL Server!”

Over time people have come to accept this fact but are not really comfortable with it; in contrast other companies like Meridio have continued to rely on secure file systems to hold the bulk of the contents.

Now with the release of MOSS and some very large deployments we currently looking at installations with TB of data (even allowing for quotas and the exclusion of media files from the sites).   We are finding the use of SQL Server to be costly in terms of very fast SAN storage and SQL instances when we have to scale out to very large numbers of content databases to keep within our DR windows.

If you saw the presentation from my previous post “shift happens” you will know that this data is growing… fast!

How will SQL Server 2008 help?

There is a new FileStream data type which allows large binary data to be stored in the file system and yet remain an integral part of the database with transactional consistency. And yes, you read correct: with transactional consistency!

This enables scale-out of large binary data to be managed by the database and yet stored on cheaper storage and file systems.

Applications can use a new storage type “VARBINARY(MAX) FILESTREAM” to define table columns and store large binary data as files in the file system instead of as a SQL BLOB. Applications can use T-SQL SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements to query and modify FILESTREAM data. 

The FILESTREAM type leverages Win32 rich set of streaming APIs which is proven to be more efficient and faster the larger the data gets.

SQL Server 2008 Platform

This diagram shows the Integrated Storage Platform with the FileStream content and also the new Spatial data.  It also shows the abstraction of information into Entities that developers can now use to interact with the data using the ADO.Net Entity Framework and LINQ. 

SQL Server 2008 finally moves SQL Server on from being just a relational database!

Thanks to Pedram Rezaeis Ramblings for his explanation on the FileStream data type.

If you want to find out more

SQL Server Future Versions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 6:27 am and is filed under SharePoint. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.