I have consolidated some frequently asked questions for FileTable. I’ll try to cover as much as I can so that all your questions related to Filetable can be clarified. All these answers are based on SQL Server 2012 version these may change in future version and editions which I’ll be updating with the latest release.
I have created an article sometime back about filetables but I have covered how to work with it. It’s now time for writing this article. In my earlier article you came to know what’s filetable and how it’s useful. Let’s now jump in to create and work with filetables. You need to satisfy all the pre-requisites which we have taken care in the earlier article.
Filetable is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 which allows application to access files that’s stored in disk via SQL Server, that’s the main function. In other words you can store files and directories to windows NTFS folders and these files can be accessed non transactional from application like regular file system. FileTables act as a normal table however it requires FILESTREAM to be enabled. You can query & update this table to get information about the directories and files stored in the location and also it’s hierarchy.