With a big amount of data that is uploaded to SQL server from the Web you
will face 2 problems...

1. ASP.NET does not allow to upload files bigger than 4 megabytes by
default.

Solution: Check out this article for details
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479405.aspx
OR you might need to use non .NET way to do it with some third party
component.

2. MS SQL can handle huge amount of data. The problem to get that data in
there (into database).  The problem is transaction log. It grows enormously
when you do repeated INSERT many thousand times. And MS SQL needs to
reallocate it constantly which is very costly and time consuming...

Solution: You need to do research on "bulk copy", specify correct BACKUP
model for your database.
You can use BULK INSERT or bcp.exe command.
bcp.exe allows you to have SQL server on separate machine than uploaded
file.

The way I did it is that I would take a file, make csv file out of it with
predefined columns and run bcp.exe to get it into SQL server.

PS: I heard that .NET 3.0 (or 3.5) supports bulk operation so you can do it
yourself instead of using bcp.exe

George.

you have two issues upload and download. we will cover download first because
its simple.

1) to download, you page shoudl turn off bufferering and use the sqlserver
getbytes with a buffer (say 2k) or readtext function to read the data in
chunks, then response.write to write it.

2) upload is a different problem. the builtin control load the uploaded file
into memory (thus your out of memory message). you need to replace it with a
new upload control, that either writes to a temp file (many 3rd party do
this), or streams it the database.

unless you know how to write c/c++ isapi filters (or on iis7.0) you will
probably have to buy a 3rd party upload control.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

Have you considered writing the file to the file system, and only storing
the path/filename in the db?

Jeff