Introduction
There are various new features in SharePoint 2013 over SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2013 is a big change from SharePoint's earlier Versions (2007 & 2013). It has a new UI, a new development app model and many performance improvement capabilities. SharePoint 2013 is a huge hit among SharePoint communities and business.
SharePoint 2013 was released with some exciting features such as:
- Real Time Social Feed
- Shredded Storage
- SharePoint Apps
- Cross-site publishing
- Out-of-Box PDF support
- Minimal Download Strategy
Here I will explain Shredded Storage.
Shredded Storage is a new storage model implementation in SharePoint Server 2013 providing smoother I/O patterns, improved data transfer performance and a reduction of storage utilization when using historical versions with SharePoint.
- Shredded storage is SharePoint 2013, running on SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012.
- Shredded storage is different than Cobalt.
- BLOBS such as Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations, Microsoft Word Documents and so on.
How Shredded Storage Works
- Every document in SharePoint 2013 is now stored as multiple “shredded BLOBS” in the new “DocStreams” data table. Whenever a new version of a document is created, a new record is written in this data table that contains only the “Shred BLOB” of the original document that corresponds to the change, merged with the new changes.
- As you probably know, documents stored in a library or as attachments are stored as Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) in the content database, by default. Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is a set of APIs that let you move BLOBs out of the SQL Server content database to another storage mechanism.
- In other words, a new BLOB with changes is added as a new row to the table. Each BLOB that is added contains a numerical Id that represents the source BLOB.
Example
- User A opens a 10 MB PowerPoint Presentation. She modifies its content by adding a new slide and/or updating the presentation's attributes and properties and she subsequently saves the file back to the originating Document Library.
- In this example only the portion of the file related to the change is written to the data store.
- At the end it is the job of a BLOB Index to track BLOBs and to create a full file with the combination of entries that point to the unchanged shreds of the previous version(s) and the entries that point to the newly added changed shreds.