Binary Large Objects, or BLOBs as the SQL types like to call them, are the byte arrays that represent documents and other files in SharePoint.  Typicaly, they are stored in the SharePoint content database.  The reality is, the ECM industry has known for decades that RDBMS is not the best place to store BLOBs.  SQL database storage needs to be high IOPS and low latency... translated... EXPENSIVE storage.  It's much more efficient if we are able to store the BLOBs on lower cost, possibly even archival-class storage while we continue to invest in high performance storage for the structured content metadata. As...

For the last several years, I've worked on several projects that stretch the recommended limits regarding the amount of content that SharePoint can handle.  Back in December of 2007 I started on an interesting scalability journey with a couple of awesome guys at Microsoft.  The first, Paul Learning, is a quality MCS SharePoint guy out of Detroit.  The second, Andy Hopkins, served as our red-tape bulldozer.  The three of us worked to put a small server room full of Fujitsu blades and storage arrays to good use in order to prove that SharePoint could do 50 million documents. The result of our efforts was a very...

I have been very fortunate over the last several years in that I've had many opprtunities to architect many extremely high scale SharePoint systems.  Everything from your standard 3 million document Imaging Repository to systems with 10's and even more than 100 million documents (thanks to FAST ESP!) As I look back on SharePoint 2003 and even to existing SharePoint 2007 solutions, there have definately been several challenges as we design systems that can handle the millions of documents we throw at them.  So it is with great pleasure that I am able to present my 4 favorite improvements in SP2010...

Well, here I am, 24 hours past the SPC2009 ride.  Now I feel like I'm on a long slow decompression ascension (lame scuba reference) to the public launch of SP2010 next year some time. Now that the SP2010 veil is lifted, I'm finally free to talk about some incredible new SP2010 features that are abslutely CLUTCH for scaling SharePoint to sizes we may only have dreamed of before! I have all these ideas floating around for what I want to say.  So I started writing this post and it just plain grew too large.  So I decided to break it up into seperate posts in a SP2010 Scalability...

I'll talk about the SharePoint 2009 conference in a sec, but a few have been asking where I been the last couple months?  Well, I've been grinding on a huge solution implementation for a gigantic customer that unfortunately must remain nameless.  It will be the largest SharePoint based document imaging system that I've had the pleasure to work on.  Think 100 to 200 MILLION documents in SharePoint!  Our CERT environment alredy has 15 million.  Cool stuff!  So that's where I've been.  Where am I going?  Well... LAS VEGAS BABY! The time is nearly here for the SharePoint 2010 feature set to be unveiled...