The SQL Server 2008 R2 November Community Technology Preview Feature Pack is available for download now. This includes a refresh of the Remote Blob Storage package.

Significant enhancements have been made in this release for performance and integration with SharePoint 2010. These changes include implementing the IDisposable interface in the SqlRemoteBlobCollectionManager and SqlRemoteBlobContext classes. This allows RBS to manage the lifetime of resources used by these objects and reuse them through a pooling mechanism.

While this is not needed to ensure correctness, in order to take full advantage of the performance changes existing applications must be modified to use the IDisposable pattern:

SqlRemoteBlobContext context = new SqlRemoteBlobContext(conn);

// RBS operations

Should be replaced with

using (SqlRemoteBlobContext context = new SqlRemoteBlobContext(conn))

{

    // RBS operations

}

Note that this release contains breaking changes preventing access to data stored in FILESTREAM blob stores using previous CTP releases. Uninstalling previous versions and removing the FILESTREAM blob store data prior to installing this one is recommended for configurations using FILESTREAM stores.

SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Feature Pack link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=020EE0D5-BCE4-4A45-9D64-B0C49C8831E5&displaylang=en

Install and configure Remote BLOB Storage on SharePoint Foundation 2010:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663474(office.14).aspx