SharePoint 2010: Storing Documents on the File System with Remote Blob Storage
Great article by Daman Armstrong which might make Sharepoint more usable in a realistic production environment.
"Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is a means of storing the large unstructured data outside of theSharePoint database, by using a BLOB provider. It can provide some very useful options if the size of your SharePoint database is becoming unmanageable, but shouldn't be seen as a general storage panacea. "
