Garry Bargsley hits us with a blast from the past:
Hello, dear blog reader. Today’s post is coming to you straight from the home office, ready to talk about a topic that comes up more than you’d think: storing PDF documents inside SQL Server.
Whether it’s invoices, reports, scanned forms, or contracts, applications often need somewhere to park files. You could store them on a network share and hope nothing breaks the link, or you could pull them fully into SQL Server where they live alongside your data. In this post, I’m going to walk you through setting up FILESTREAM and FileTable in SQL Server, a feature set that gives you the best of both worlds: transactional integrity from SQL Server and file system performance from NTFS.
I really liked FileTable when it came out, though I don’t believe we ever saw much in the way of additional functionality around FileTable post-2012.
The main challenge I have with FILESTREAM today is that there are too many better places to put documents. There are very few and specific circumstances in which the technology makes sense in a world where block storage in a cloud is cheap and document storage applications are plentiful if you actually need them.