If you are familiar with the external blob storage (EBS) capabilities in SharePoint 2007, then remote
blob storage (RBS) won ’ t seem that different to you in SharePoint 2010. The main difference is
that RBS takes advantage of the APIs from SQL Server 2008 and can use the new FILESTREAM
capabilities in the SQL Server 2008 product. EBS was built on its own API, and the move to RBS
moves the blob storage capabilities from SharePoint into the more mainstream API for blobs.
You may be wondering when you use blob storage. As a developer, the blob storage is pretty
transparent to you, except if you ’ re writing your own blob storage provider. IT pros are the ones
who will make the decision and enable external blob storage in their environment. The main reason
you will use external blob storage is if you want to move your blobs to more commodity - related
hardware storage devices. You may be able to lower your cost a bit, because you don ’ t have to store,
manage, or maintain the blobs in SQL. Again, as a developer, it ’ s transparent to you whether the
blob is in SQL or another system.
There are a couple of things you need to remember about RBS. It does not get around the 2GB limit
for fi le sizes in SharePoint. This is a hard limit. So as a developer, don ’ t ask your IT administrator to
implement RBS to get around this limit. Plus, RBS could lower your performance, especially if you
write a poor provider. Therefore, as a developer, make sure that the benefi ts of using RBS and
writing your own provider outweigh the cost, because if you write poor code, possibly every read or
write operation on documents could call your code in SharePoint. SharePoint must block the user
until it receives the blob back from your provider, because it wants to keep the metadata, which is
still stored in SQL, and the blob consistent. Writing a storage provider is beyond the scope of this
book. The SDK has some good documentation, but again, before you write one, make sure that you
really need one and that, if you want RBS, the SQL Server FILESTREAM provider is not suffi cient
to meet your needs.
blob storage (RBS) won ’ t seem that different to you in SharePoint 2010. The main difference is
that RBS takes advantage of the APIs from SQL Server 2008 and can use the new FILESTREAM
capabilities in the SQL Server 2008 product. EBS was built on its own API, and the move to RBS
moves the blob storage capabilities from SharePoint into the more mainstream API for blobs.
You may be wondering when you use blob storage. As a developer, the blob storage is pretty
transparent to you, except if you ’ re writing your own blob storage provider. IT pros are the ones
who will make the decision and enable external blob storage in their environment. The main reason
you will use external blob storage is if you want to move your blobs to more commodity - related
hardware storage devices. You may be able to lower your cost a bit, because you don ’ t have to store,
manage, or maintain the blobs in SQL. Again, as a developer, it ’ s transparent to you whether the
blob is in SQL or another system.
There are a couple of things you need to remember about RBS. It does not get around the 2GB limit
for fi le sizes in SharePoint. This is a hard limit. So as a developer, don ’ t ask your IT administrator to
implement RBS to get around this limit. Plus, RBS could lower your performance, especially if you
write a poor provider. Therefore, as a developer, make sure that the benefi ts of using RBS and
writing your own provider outweigh the cost, because if you write poor code, possibly every read or
write operation on documents could call your code in SharePoint. SharePoint must block the user
until it receives the blob back from your provider, because it wants to keep the metadata, which is
still stored in SQL, and the blob consistent. Writing a storage provider is beyond the scope of this
book. The SDK has some good documentation, but again, before you write one, make sure that you
really need one and that, if you want RBS, the SQL Server FILESTREAM provider is not suffi cient
to meet your needs.
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