SharePoint 2013 has many improvements compared to earlier versions. Among all of them the great feature which I liked more is Shredded Storage. It is great news for DBA and administrators as well. Shredded Storage is a new implementation in SharePoint 2013 and it will help many ways to save the volume of data saving in back-end servers.
Take below scenario. In SharePoint 2010, when we enabling versions on SharePoint Document libraries, for each edit operation whether it could be a file change or the metadata change a version will be created. For each version in the back-end the file + metadata both will be saved. So if a document is of size 2MB then for 5 versions it will be of 10MB total size irrespective of how much file is edited.
Issues we found here is, user modified only the metadata of a document but not done any modifications to the document. Still it creates another copy of document in back-end. So which is simply creating a copy for each version no matter what user edited. So, we are end up with huge and huge databases for medium/large scale FARMS. This will be a main problem for DBA, Administrators for maintaining and taking backups.
How Shredded Storage helps here? Shredded Storage only saves the bits which are changed in the document are saved to the database. Which means if a user is modified the document, then before saving the file to database it will detect the changes (as we all know since office 2007 format the office data saved in XML format) by comparing XML data and save only the changed data. So, if a file size is 2MB and it has 5 versions then the total size will be less than 10MB. This way we can save huge amount of size in databases in real time environments for medium and large scale FARMs.
By default Shredded Storage feature is turned on (out of the box feature). As it is a default feature it will work with RBS (Remote Blob Storage) as well without any issues. By using these features we can solve problems which we are facing today because of heavy databases for site collections and web applications.
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