SharePoint Content DB exceed 200 GB

Question

As per Microsoft site I saw content DB size will be 200 GB for best performance. I want to know if site collection size reached 200 GB then as an admin, what action should I take to reduce the size so that my site will work smoothly. In my company users are uploading more files and because of that data usage will increase very fast, so I need a suggestion on this.

Answer 1

In your case, the best option is split the site collection into multiple site collections.each site collection should be in own content database.

You have to decide upon the usage and target department. Splitting the site collection will create a new URL for new site collection which may upset the users. When you split it to multiple site collections then you have to redevelop your coding if there is any. It is not an easy task but looks like this is the only options.

Now if you use the 3rd party tools( sharegate or metlogix) then the splitting will be easy but if you use your import & export method then it will time-consuming.

Answer 2

2 things I can think off hand:

• Tell users to start purging content that is no longer necessary.

• Use Move-SPSite to move some site collections to a new content database.

Based on your comment and making some assumptions, it isn't going to be that easy. You'll need to fracture off some of your subsites and make them their own site collections and then you can use the move-spsite operation to move them into new content databases.

Answer 3

You basically have two options:

1. Split your content across multiple site collections and distribute the site collections evenly in multiple content databases.
2. Meet the requirements to use 4 TB content databases.

Do you use sub-sites within your one site collection? If yes, stop doing this and create site collections instead. Use managed navigation to build a logical navigation structure across the site collections.

Answer 4

I think you should spend little more time in "architecting" your farm.

So as mentioned in above excellent answers, you can create multiple content databases for site collection.

In addition to this, you should turn on versioning in the document libraries as SP 2013, we have the concept of Shredded storage.

What it means -

SharePoint 2013’s Shredded Storage is an attempt by Microsoft to reduce the I/O impact when saving versions of a document or file by "shredding" it into smaller pieces and reassembling it when someone needs to access it.

Shredded storage in SP2013

The Truth behind Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013

In addition to this, you can configure RBS to move large files to location outside content database.

In SharePoint 2013, a binary large object (BLOB) is a large block of data stored in a database that is known by its size and location instead of by its structure — for example a Office document or a video file. By default, these BLOBs, also known as unstructured data, are stored directly in the SharePoint content database together with the associated metadata, or structured data. Because these BLOBs can be very large, it might be better to store BLOBs outside the content database. BLOBs are immutable. Therefore,, a new copy of the BLOB must be stored for each version of that BLOB. Because of this, as a database’s usage increases, the total size of its BLOB data can expand quickly and grow larger than the total size of the document metadata and other structured data that is stored in the database. BLOB data can consume lots of space and uses server resources that are optimized for database access patterns. Therefore, it can be helpful to move BLOB data out of the SQL Server database, and onto commodity or content addressable storage. To do this, you can use RBS.

Overview of RBS in SharePoint 2013

Deciding to use RBS in SharePoint 2013