Storing PDF files as binary objects in SQL Server, yes or no?

With SQL Server 2008, when you have documents that are mostly 1 MB or more in size, the FILESTREAM feature would be recommended. This is based on a paper published by Microsoft Research called To BLOB or not to BLOB which analyzed the pros and cons of storing blobs in a database in great length - great read!

For documents of less than 256K on average, storing them in a VARBINARY(MAX) column seems to be the best fit.

Anything in between is a bit of a toss-up, really.

You say you'll have PDF documents mostly around 100K or so -> those will store very nicely into a SQL Server table, no problem. One thing you might want to consider is having a separate table for the documents that is linked to the main facts table. That way, the facts table will be faster in usage, and the documents don't get in the way of your other data.

This was asked many times about storing images, but the discussion to those still applies:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/805519/save-image-in-database
• store image in database or in a system file?
• Should I store my images in the database or folders?
• Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?

I would also create a separate table for the documents, that way the search data/key fields for document retrieval will be more cache'able. The only time your database will need to touch the document table is during an insert or download.