Error exporting list to excel - permissions for resource throttling ceiling

Question

What level of permissions have to be assigned to a user account in SharePoint 2010 for them to qualify as an "administrator" and therefore grant them access to the higher ceiling for resource throttling in Central Admin (20,000 vs 5,000).

My account was added to the "Farm Administrators" group from Central Administration, but I still encountered the following error when trying to export a library to excel with more than 5000 items:

An opertation that uses the database driver could not be completed...

Please reference this thread for more specifics on that error.

The error was resolved by increasing the "resource throttling" limit for regular users to a number higher than the number of documents in the library for export. This is a sub-optimal solution as we do not want to increase that limit; I simply need to know what permission levels need to be added to my account in order to grant me the higher throttling ceiling.

Answer 1

The user must be a Site Collection Administrator for the specific site collection and Farm Administrators, by default, do not have this permission. This link has a good write-up of how and where these limits apply. There is also this Microsoft article that details the specifics of the threshold as well as workarounds for it.