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Category: Filestream

Analyzing Windows Documents with SQL Server Semantic Search

Published 2020-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Haroon Ashraf begins a series on semantic search over files:

The article examines storing unstructured data using native windows directory structure and managing it through the SQL Server database. Subsequently, we demonstrate how to perform comparative analysis with the help of Semantic Search in order to get valuable information out of the data. Additionally, you are going to get some hands-on experience of storing and linking documents on Windows File System and using Semantic Search.

It is of great importance for both database beginners and professionals to know how to apply file storage strategies such as File Table to searching technologies like Semantic Search for unstructured data analysis.

The first part of the series is all about setting up FileTable.

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Copying Filestream Data Between Tables

Published 2019-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal takes us through some limitations on copying Filestream data between tables:

I was asked last week whether it’s possible to create a table with a FILESTREAM column and then populate that column by copying FILESTREAM files from another directory in the FILESTREAM data container.

The simple answer is no.

Paul explains why this isn’t possible and then gives you an alternative which does work.

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Problem With Merge Replication And FILESTREAM

Published 2018-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori walks us through an error when combining merge replication with FILESTREAM:

I published tables with FILESTREAM data before, but it seems like there is a particular planetary alignment that triggers an error during the execution of the snapshot agent.

This unlikely combination consists in a merge article with a FILESTREAM column and two UNIQUE indexes on the ROWGUIDCOL column. Yes, I know that generally it does not make sense to have two indexes on the same column, but this happened to be one of the cases where it did, so we had a CLUSTERED PRIMARY KEY on the uniqueidentifier column decorated with the ROWGUIDCOL attribute and, on top, one more NONCLUSTERED UNIQUE index on the same column, backed by a UNIQUE constraint.

Setting up the publication does not throw any error, but generating the initial snapshot for the publication does:

Cannot create, drop, enable, or disable more than one constraint,
column, index, or trigger named 'ncMSmerge_conflict_TestMergeRep_DataStream'
in this context. Duplicate names are not allowed.

This is a rather specific confluence of events, so it probably won’t affect many people.  Still, it is a bug.

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Filestream Garbage Collection Bug

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon found a bug with Filestream:

I tracked the problem back to this specific scenario: When you have a database that is part of an Availability Group, and you drop a table that contains filestream data, the filestream garbage collection does not clean up the data container subdirectory that corresponds to that table. Garbage collection will continue to clean up other items (eg, deleted rows), but the dropped table never gets cleaned up.

I’ve logged this as a connect item for your up-voting pleasure.

Go forth and upvote.

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