A large amount of items approach in SharePoint

Question

One of the customers decided to migrate his solution to SharePoint. As far as I know, there would be an issue with the SharePoint threshold limitations.

There is like 20k items to migrate to primary list and will increase every year by 10k items.

That's a lot and there are some maintenance lists with a similar issue.

I was thinking about SharePoint Online Provider-hosted App and using external DB for storing the data. Have you struggled with similar issues? How would you deal with it?

Answer 1

In the most obvious way: avoiding reaching 5000 in the first place.

99% of the times a migration means also the chance to evaluate the current lists and libraries and transfer them in the new location with a better approach. One thing is 'dead' libraries that are there for archive purpose only, another matter is 'live' lists such as the one you are talking about.

You can prepare a template of the list with the same columns and transfer the data up to 5000, then create another list from the same template and repeat the operation.

This is the cheapest and most effective solution with a chance of longevity. Anything else is hot air. I do not want that a list with problems sorting, filtering or while creating a view is blamed on me when it is clearly stated that Microsoft does not support anything above 5000 items.

Answer 2

If you really need large lists of data then why not just look at the Common Data Service. With a PowerApp you could then develop the apps that you need without any real need to code.

Answer 3

30k can be easily handled by SP as long as you don't have custom permissions on each item (SPO support up to 30 million). There is a view limit of 5K items but you can address that by using indexed columns.

The crux here are the permissions if you have custom then indeed the list is not a good option, but if all items are visible to specific group of users you should be fine.

REF: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-limits