By Iqbal Khan
Organizations of all sizes are using Microsoft SharePoint as a document management and repository system, among other things. As a result, SharePoint is storing a large number of documents, with numbers often reaching into the millions.
SharePoint stores all these documents in the SQL Server database as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs). Like other relational databases, SQL Server wasn’t designed to store BLOBs of this magnitude. As a result, it can choke at various levels. This degrades SharePoint performance and makes database administration painful.
To address this problem, Microsoft introduced a COM-based External BLOB Storage (EBS) provider model in SharePoint 2007. EBS lets you offload BLOBs to outside storage and greatly reduce the database size. This resolved the database size issue, but not having a native .NET provider had performance overhead and wasn’t a "clean integration" with SharePoint. So, this solution wasn’t really considered complete.
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