One of the big advantages to storing files in a SQL Server 2012 FileTable is to have the ability to copy files directly to the FILESTREAM storage. But sometimes you may want to create new files or directories using a T-SQL procedure. It’s not hard to do. In these scripts it’s assumed that you have already enabled FILESTREAMING on your SQL instance and have created a database that has at least one FileTable. My database is called DemoDB and my table is called dbo.Documents. Inserting existing objects is the same as I described in an earlier post on converting existing data to FileTables . The only difference is I just need to supply a filename and the filestream. The constraints on the table take care of the rest of the fields. USE DemoDB; -- Insert test images into LOB table DECLARE @image1 VARBINARY(MAX) DECLARE @image2 VARBINARY(MAX) SELECT @image1 = CAST(bulkcolumn AS VARBINARY(MAX)) FROM OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\File Table Demo\Photos\SF Sailboat.jpg', SINGLE_BLOB) AS x SELECT @image2 = CAST(bulkcolumn AS VARBINARY(MAX)) FROM OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\File Table Demo\Photos\Half Dome.jpg', SINGLE_BLOB) AS y INSERT INTO dbo.Documents (name, file_stream) SELECT 'SF Sailboat.jpg', @image1 INSERT INTO dbo.Documents (name, file_stream) SELECT 'Half Dome.jpg', @image2; You can create a new file in a similar manner. In this example I’m writing the phrase “This is my notes file” to a new file called Notes.txt. Since it’s a character string I need to convert it to varbinary. INSERT INTO dbo.Documents (name, file_stream) SELECT 'Notes.txt', CAST('This is my notes file' AS VARBINARY(MAX)); If you want to create a blank file you need to specify the value of 0x for the file_stream. INSERT INTO dbo.Documents(name, file_stream) SELECT 'InsertedTextFile.txt', 0x; Creating a new directory is similar. All you need is the directory name and to set the is_directory flag to 1. INSERT INTO dbo.Documents(name, is_directory) SELECT 'MyFiles', 1 Notice that the file_stream value for the new directory is NULL. You don’t need to specify a file_stream value for directories. So far every file we’ve inserted into the FileTable is at the root level. What if we want to create a sub directory, or insert a file into a specific location? In that case we need to get the path_locator of the directory we want to use, then build a new hierarchyid using that path. In this next script I’m creating a blank file called Notes2.txt and I’m placing it into the MyFiles directory I created earlier. I use the same SQL that the path_locator constraint uses. DECLARE @path HIERARCHYID DECLARE @new_path VARCHAR(675) SELECT @path = path_locator FROM dbo.Documents WHERE name = 'MyFiles' SELECT @new_path = @path.ToString() + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), CONVERT(BIGINT, SUBSTRING(CONVERT(BINARY(16), NEWID()), 1, 6))) + '.' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), CONVERT(BIGINT, SUBSTRING(CONVERT(BINARY(16), NEWID()), 7, 6))) + '.' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), CONVERT(BIGINT, SUBSTRING(CONVERT(BINARY(16), NEWID()), 13, 4))) + '/' INSERT INTO dbo.Documents(name, file_stream, path_locator) SELECT 'Notes2.txt', 0x, @new_path Now when I query my table I can see the parent_path_location for the new Notes2.txt file is the same value as the path_location for the MyFiles directory. And if I browse to the location with Windows Explorer I’ll see the new file in the new directory.
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