SQL Server Filestream Limitation

SQL Server FILESTREAM limitation

FILESTREAM does not actually require local storage, just not SMB network storage. An iSCSI or Fiber Channel SAN works fine to store FILESTREAM data. You can also have multiple filestream file groups per table, essentially partitioning your data. If you are strictly targeting sql server 2008 there is very little reason to not use filestream for large binary data. There is a Microsoft whitepaper describing filestream partitioning here.

Is SQL Server Express' 4GB limit affected by FILESTREAM enabled columns?

SQL Server Express supports
FILESTREAM. The 4-GB database size
limit does not include the FILESTREAM
data container.

From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895334.aspx

SQL 2013 Filestream Filegroup Full, but have plenty of space?

The answer through empirical evidence was to force garbage collection: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg492195.aspx

Created a SQL job to run every minute (is faster if ran more often, less to do) to force garbage collection. Once the garbage collector caught up, as it will stop after so much time (even if not fully completed) all went away.

This also released the delete entries from the disk.

Hope this helps someone, even Microsoft Support ticket opened did not figure this one out.

SQL Filestream for objects which size is less than 1MB

Microsoft deals with this in their documentation:

When to Use FILESTREAM

In SQL Server, BLOBs can be standard varbinary(max) data that stores
the data in tables, or FILESTREAM varbinary(max) objects that store
the data in the file system. The size and use of the data determines
whether you should use database storage or file system storage. If the
following conditions are true, you should consider using FILESTREAM:

• Objects that are being stored are, on average, larger than 1 MB.
• Fast read access is important.
• You are developing applications that use a middle tier for
  application logic.

For smaller objects, storing varbinary(max) BLOBs in the database
often provides better streaming performance.

So it should work (assuming Express supports it) -- you might just have impaired performance over the in-database approach for smaller objects.

Overcoming the SQL Server Express Edition limitation

From Express Edition:

SQL Server Express includes 10GB of storage per database

and from Features Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2014, Cross-Box Scale Limits:

Maximum relational database size: 10 GB

This latter reference makes it clearer that the 10GB limit per database is applied to relational data, so it excludes log files* as well as FILESTREAM and FileTable data (both supported in Express Edition).

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_{* See Database size limitation in SQL Express by Arvind Shyamsundar}

SQL Server Filestream - Delete speed

After some more research (and thanks to Paul Randal's blog - lots of very detailed information surrounding filestream and garbage collection), once the rows are deleted and a checkpoint is executed, the files are put in a system table (Tombstone table), then every 10 seconds a process (Ghost Cleanup) runs and remove some items from that table (20 to be exact). So basically we are limited to 2 deletes/seconds and there seems to be no way (yet) to change this behavior.

Since I have a sustained 4 deletes per seconds I will need to find an alternative to filestream.

Thanks everyone for your inputs.

SQL Server 2008 Filestream File Size Contribution

No it does not count towards the size
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2010/06/03/sql-server-express-size-limit-filestream-excepted.aspx

SQL Server FILESTREAM performance

Reality check: Issue 2 is a non-issue. In a cluster ALL data must be on shared discs, otherwise the cluster failover can not access the data. If that defeats the purpose fof a cluster you are invited to install a SQL Server cluster without shared discs. ALL data storage on clusters must be on shared discs. Has been like this since cluster service was first created for windows.

Which basically makes your conclusions already quite - hm - wrong.

You also need to make some mathmatics. 5th grade style.

Can I serve up say 100 users with 100
1 MB files within a 5 second window?

Ignore SQL Server for a moment. Depending on how I read this thi is either 100mb or 10.000mb. Anyhow, 100mb in 5 seconds = 20mb per second, which runs around 200mbit. This is serious traffic. We taalkg of minimum 250 to 300mbit needed external bandwidth.

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