Microsoft SharePoint 2010 : Streamline SharePoint with RBS

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.

In SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft released a native .NET-based Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) interface as a replacement for EBS. RBS also helps reduce SharePoint 2010 database size greatly. It does so by offloading all BLOBs from the SharePoint content database into a user-specified external storage. Stubs and metadata for these BLOBs are still kept in the content database. As a result, SharePoint still thinks these BLOBs are part of SharePoint and can access them the same way. Users don’t feel any difference because all BLOBs are still logically part of the content database.

Now Microsoft has provided a default implementation called the RBS Filestream. However, this is fairly basic and doesn’t provide a lot of flexibility for serious SharePoint users. Although it does offload BLOBs, it doesn’t let you specify filters for which BLOBs to offload and which ones to keep in the database. You end up offloading all BLOBs whether you mean to or not. Also, it doesn’t let you specify a remote storage location and stores BLOBs only on a local storage on the SQL Server machine. It also has no administration or monitoring tools.