BLOB Content in SharePoint – How Much Fat Can Be Trimmed?

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter recently regarding BLOB (Binary Large OBject) storage in SQL. In fact, people have been talking about it many years. Thankfully, there are quotas which can be enforced, however, you still need to store BLOBs (photos, images, videos, documents – basically any attachments or files uploaded into SharePoint are BLOBs) in SharePoint, and SQL disk space can be, and is expensive.

Now, there are a lot of companies, some who are partners with Grace-Hunt, which make use of functionality within the SharePoint API to store files out of band from SQL, maintaining these BLOBs just as if they were in SQL. One of those companies, StoragePoint. They have a free tool, called BLOBulator, which is definitely geared towards their product, however, it is a great tool to peer into your SharePoint environment, and see how much space you actually can save by using an out of band BLOB storage solution such as theirs.

This is not a marketing effort – however, more of a reference point for myself to remember this tool, and share it with others who may have some use for it.