Jose Barreto: As I mentioned in a previous blog post at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/03/17/sql-server-2008-and-unstructured-data.aspx, SQL Server 2008 introduces new options to store unstructured data, in addition to the current BLOB support we have in SQL Server 2005.
One of those options is the new SQL Server Remote Blob Store, a method for storing blobs of unstructured data in a remote server, external to SQL Server. RBS is part of the add-on feature pack for SQL Server 2008. With RBS, you can store BLOBs on a Remote Blob Store (RBS). An RBS store is typically a separate box on same the network as the SQL Server. This is managed by SQL Server and integrity between the database records and the RBS external store is maintained.
Using RBS, your application can store large amounts of unstructured data (like videos or office documents), enjoying both the relational capabilities of SQL Server and the scalability of a dedicated blob store. Best of all, you do not have to write the code to handle the job of tying the SQL metadata and the blob data together. Transactional consistency is completely handled by RBS.
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