>Databases are not large, typically tens of GB.
>
>I don't know if docs are zipped prior to being embedded in the database. If not that might be a good way to improve file transfer over relatively slow connections. It seems like it might be a common situation, I wonder whether SQL Server has any sort of compression option built-in to its transport mechanisms...

YMMV... look at most of the documents today, they are either pdf or docx/xlsx or images. The pdf is already compressed somewhat (it's a compiled PostScript script); *.*x and OpenDocument type files are zipped sets of xml files, jpg/png/gif etc are also compressed - they were invented exactly to save on space and/or bandwidth, as nobody (except Microsoft and disk makers) likes bmp files.

If, however, there's a lot of older Word documents, go for it, they zip like crazy.