SharePoint world of ECM and Information Management : Content DB

SharePoint Tip #25. Do you know “How to calculate Content DB grow”?

Michael — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:57:35 GMT

SharePoint content databases grow very rapidly when used in document imaging system or in file share replacement scenarios. With this in mind it is important to consider growth and overhead factors when determining how much content will eventually be stored in a given content database.

Use the following formula to calculate Content DB size.

Low: 1.2 * [Raw Storage Size] = ContentDB Size
High: 1.5 * [Raw Storage Size] = ContentDB Size

If possible, separate each data file to exist on separate logical units consisting of unique physical disk spindles

Source

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Tips to create a Site Collection in new Content Database

Michael — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:26:00 GMT

Intro

Ken Zheng posted a good overview of how to create a Site Collection in new Content Database http://littletalk.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/creating-a-site-collection-in-a-new-content-database/

I’d like to add some notes to Ken’s post, regarding planning site collections and sub-sites among different content databases.

There are some reasons, why you could have several content databases:

MS recommends to have content database not more the 100Gb, otherwise it could hinder performance.
Data usage optimization
It simplifies farm backup and restoration.
It provides flexibility for Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy.

Scenario - Data Usage

The major advance of several content databases is splitting your site collection and sub-sited among several content databases based on the content type and content usage. For example, you can have media sites and media data stored in separate content database and separate SQL server, which is tuned, indexed and partitioned to work with BLOB data; or sites which are used for document management, in separate SQL server with content database optimized for textual information.

If you will store different type of content information inside one big single content database in won’t help you to use all advantages of SQL Server to optimize your data usage.

Scenario – Backup/Restore

Having several content database makes you data restoration faster, because you need to restore only that content database, where origin site/data located.

Scenario – DR

Usually when you implement DR strategy your DR box locates outside current network and outside the current organization, and you could have slow network connection there (reasonably slower then inside your network). So, setting SQL mirroring takes a lot of time if you have very big database. Moreover, with the different content databases you can leverage the importance of your data and mirroring to different locations, for example mirroring your vital financial data in one content database to the box outside your enterprise, and other content databases inside your network.

Tips and Tools

Ken describes how to create new sites in new content databases, but what if you already have 200Gb content database and what to split and reorganize your data across several new content databases?! SharePoint doesn’t provide OOTB UI features for this. The standard way to reorganized you data for the sub-sites is to use STSADM tool (I will discuss moving site collections separately).

The way to move your sub-sites to new content database is to follow the next steps

Go to Central Administration > Application Management > Content Databases and set the existed content database to “Offline” mode
Add new content database in Central Administration > Application Management > Content Databases. (you can use different SQL server). Now all new sites will be created in this content database
Use the following command to export your site to the disk “stsadm -o export -url http://<path_to_site> -filename c:\<exportedSite>.exp -overwrite -nofilecompression -includeusersecurity -cabsize 1024”.
Delete your exported site collection in Central Administration > Application Management > Delete Site Collection
Create new empty location with the same path, via stsadm –o createweb/createsite;
Import you site to the same url, and site will be created in the new content database. Use the following command for this “stsadm -o import –url http://<path_to_site> -filename c:\<location_of_your_exorted_package>.exp -nofilecompression -haltonfatalerror –includeusersecurity”

Now you will have you sub-site in new content database. It’s not very user friendly approach, and is an error proned a bit.

But there is one small tool - SharePoint Administration Tookit, which helps you to to reorganise the whole site collections. This feature will install a new section inside “Applications”and you can move your site collection via Central Administration interface.

Resume

Plan you site collections / sub-sites content with you database administration guys

Take into account that you can’t split site and site content between content databases, for example you can’t specify storing all site’s *.avi files in separate content db. I hope it will be changed in the next version of SharePoint, but now site and site content are stored together.

Mirror: Tips to create a Site Collection in new Content Database

Renaming server PC with Sharepoint

Michael — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:36:00 GMT

Usually all Sharepoint development happens on virtual environment. There are several advantages of this, like

creating snapshots of your system to mitigate system restore when you broke your environment
creating Sharepoint farm on the single PC, when you can easily run different virtual systems and setup sharepoint farm there

But when you are cloning your existed sharepoint system you end up with absolutely the same sever, including the same server name name. And this is the only problem. However, renaming server name with the installed Sharepoint is not trivial as you could expect.

There are several items which should be renamed - server name, database name, Sharepoint references. And the situation became complex when your Sharepoint sites use Sharepoint Search - in this case you need rename MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE database.

Actually, I failed with renaming Sharepoint Search DB, and decided to turn search off before system renaming.

The follow steps should be done to rename server with installed Sharepoint

Go to the Sharepoint Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server and stop "Windows SharePoint Services Search"
To go the Control Panel -> System and rename your server (save your old name somewhere). Don't restart your system
If you have MS SQL Server installed on the same box you need to rename in too - go to "SQL Server Management Studio" and execute the following script

EXEC sp_dropserver '<old_name>' GO EXEC sp_addserver '<new_name>', 'local' GO
Update Sharepoint references to the PC name calling the next command: stsadm -o renameserver -oldservername <old server name> -newservername <new server name>
Restart your PC
If you try to open Central Administration after restarting PC it will try to open the site with the old server name. You need to recreate your Central Administration site for the new server name calling the following command(any port address): psconfig -cmd adminvs -provision -port 1800 -windowsauthprovider "onlyusentlm"
Now if you restart IIS and try to open your Central Admin site it will successfully open your site with new server name
Go to the "Application Management" and remove Central Administration Web Site with old server name

That's all. Now you have the clone of your virtual server with the new server name.

Update: Guideline how to rename content database: http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2008/06/16/renaming-content-databases.aspx

Mirror: Renaming server PC with Sharepoint