SQL Server 2012 allows you to store file/directories in a special table called FileTable that builds on top of SQL Server FILESTREAM technology. As per Microsoft 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.”

FileTable has a fixed schema and each row of this table represents a file or a directory. The main advantage of FileTable is that it supports Win32APIs for file or directory management which mean we can access file and directory hierarchy through a Windows Share and database storage is transparent to Win32 application. Files can be bulk loaded, updated as well as managed in T-SQL like any other column. SQL Server also supports backup and restore job for this feature.

In this tip we will take a look at how to use FileTable…