SQL 2008 FILESTREAM - this post was written during the early release candidates and the actual implementation has changed slightly. your mileage may vary with this post. over the years people have attempted to put large amounts of non relational data in SQL. images strike me as the most popular case. generally people either stored the data directly in SQL or stored it on the filesystem with the path in SQL. neither of these were terrific options. the former was difficult to manage and frequently resulted in poor performance while the later tended to become inconsistent very quickly because SQL had no way of understanding how the filesytem was modified behind its back. enter SQL 2008's FILESTREAM storage which allows you to store LOB fields directly on the filesystem but still function as columns in...
