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SQL Server 2012 (a.k.a Denali) – New feature | FileTables

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new kid on the blog... this is my first post on MSDN Blogs after joining Microsoft very recently (Jan-2012).

I also used to blog on my personal bog site i.e. https://sqlwithmanoj.com about SQL Server (TSQL) and I'll start my 1st blog post here by referring to my latest article.

 

SQL Server 2012 (a.k.a Denali) is yet to be launched and entire Microsoft community is very excited for this event to occur, so am I. There are lot of articles comming up on various forums and blogs about new features and capabilities of SQL Server 2012.

Here I'll discuss about a new feature of SQL Server 2012 that came to my notice and grabbed my attention a few days back, It's called FileTables.

FilesTables is kind of an extention to FILESTREAM introduced with SQL Server 2008 to support files in Windows file system instead of storing them in SQL tables. This new feature brings support for the windows file namespace and compatibality with Windows Apps to the data files stored in SQL Server.

As per MS BOL, FileTable lets an application integrate its storage and data management components, and provides integrated SQL Server services, including: full-text search and semantic search - over unstructured data and metadata. In other words, you can store files and documents in special tables in SQL Server called FileTables, but access them from Windows applications as if they were stored in the file system, without making any changes to your client applications. Or can store directly in Windows file system and can access, query and update the files directly from SQL Server by issuing simple DML statements.

 

I've posted about this article with more details and a simple example can be viewed here.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    Hi Manoj, and welcome to Microsoft! The screen shots on your linked blog article are very helpful. I hope you'll post your images here in the future to keep all the info in one place. John

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2012
    Sure John, next time I'll make my post full informative :) Thanks for your comments!

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2012
    How can you tie these documents in FILETABLE to an existing record (in another table) as FILETABLE have an schema fixed, or identify the user who owns the document? When using varbinary(max) in a normal table you would know it belogs to that particular row. Maybe using the stream_id as foreign key?

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2013
    In my previous post sometime back I talked about FILETABLES , [ link ] . This is a new feature introduced