I am trying to upload word docs to an image column. I followed the cookbook for how to upload files and it works on a MySQL db (upload and download) on SQLServer however I get the following error DBI::DatabaseError: Execute OLE error code:80040E07 in Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server Operand type clash: text is incompatible with image HRESULT error code:0x80020009 Also I when I try to retrieve one (I put one in with java), all I get is numbers. It doesn''t look it is being converted to binary. Here is some my code class Attachment < ActiveRecord::Base def initialize (tmpfile) super() self.filename = tmpfile.original_filename self.content_type = tmpfile.content_type self.created = DateTime.now().strftime("%Y%m%d %I:%M") self.file = tmpfile.read end Here is how I am rendering the documents send_data attachment.file, :filename => attachment.filename, :type => attachment.content_type