We have a company farm (http://portal) which has about 50Gb of data in a single content database. We are now in the process of rolling the app to the rest of the company. Our initial estimates are that within the next 6 months we will be holding 2tb of data in SharePoint. This does make me a little concerned and I want to architecture SharePoint correctly. What would be the best practices for managing the growth? From what I've read the content database should not be greater that 100Gb. Question: There will be approx 1/2 Tb of data from a single department. If I create a site collection and new content database for this department, would all the child sites be created within the same content database as the site collection? If that is the case, how could I allow 1/2Tb of data to exist within the same site collection? From what I understand, you cannot have a Site Collection as a sub site of another Site Collection. Is this possible? E.g. http://portal/sites/Sitecollection/ChildSiteCollection Thanks, simon

Hello Simon, Yes, it is not possible to to have one site collection as a subsite of other site collection. Hence I would prefer the following solution: 1. Create one MAIN site collection for the main department(And manage its quota as per the requirement) 2. Now when you want to create a subsite under MAIN for some sub-department, create ANOTHER SITE COLLECTION with the name of sub-department. (Assign it the quota as per the requirement) 3. Now here the trick is: On the MAIN site homepage, create new TAB and quick launch link option (either or both as per your requirement) and for those links, provide the link of SUB-Department Site (which is basically a site collection); So though its a Site collection, It will look to the users as a SubSite of the MAIN site :) Repeat this for as many sites (or sub-departments in our case) as you want MAKE SURE YOU ARE CREATING THE NEW TOP LEVEL SITES IN DIFFERENT CONTENT DATABASES ACCORDINGLY Hope this helps, Regards, Rohan

To resolve Database size issue you can add several new content databases to your Web Application and move Site collections to different databases. This is good article how to do this: http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1777 Oleg

As they say, nice problem to have. Two techniques to remember. There's no problem having site collections as children of other site collections - remember, the root itself is a site collection - so again, also no restriction on having multiple databases in a collection of site collections, etc. You just need to attach them under a managed path. 100GB is a guidance number, and comes in part due to limits on manageabilioty and performasnce - but there's no magic bullet failure that happens at 101GB, and we run into content DBs in the wiled with 200-500GB frequently. Not optimal, but not fatal either. Setting up multiple DBs can minimize the problem. The other dimension to consider is why the DB's are so large. If it's due to BLOBs (Binalry Large OBjects - aka "files") especially a smaller number of very large files (e.g. 100MB image files, 450MB installers, video, etc.), there's another approach. You can reduce the size of your content DBs by moving to external BLOB storage (EBS) or remote BLOB storage (RBS). There are a variety of tools for this - there a free EBS provider from AvePoint, MetaLogix/Storage Point sell a higher end RBS solution, there are RBS providers for SQL2008 R2, etc. In short, these allow you to pull the files out of the content DB to another storage area, reducing 1TB content DBs to 50GB, etc. Well worth considering. Good luck!Chris McNulty MCSE/MCTS/MSA/MVTS http://www.kma-llc.net | blog http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge | twitter @cmcnulty2000

Oleg's reference is strong - another good one is here - http://www.astaticstate.com/2008/01/demystify-moss-content-database-sizing.html.Chris McNulty MCSE/MCTS/MSA/MVTS http://www.kma-llc.net | blog http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge | twitter @cmcnulty2000