Customer has a large (100+ GB) content database with several SharePoint site collections. He needs to break the database for performance and simplified operations. STSADM.exe mergecontentdb operation is not an option for the customer because it is only supported for site collections with 15GB of content or less. Microsoft warns that trying to move larger site collections may corrupt the database (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969242).
Recovery Manager for SharePoint (RMSP) allows to split a such big content databases by using the Restore To option. RMSP works with the target content database only. So there is no impact on production content database. RMSP will Consider content database status when restoring site collection to alternate location.
Examples
Customer wants to split the database using RMSP. The site URL’s must be retained, so customer decides to use Restore To option and restore one of the site collections into the same web app. The original site collection is backed up and deleted prior to restore.
Started content database available for the Web Application
RMSP will restore site collections only to a database with status set to “Started” as the destination for alternate location recovery.
http://company/sites/teams (10GB) and http://company/sites/groups (10GB) are in the WSS_Content database (20 GB). The new WSS_Empty content database created. WSS_Content database status set to “Stopped”. Site collection http://company/sites/teams has been Restored To the same Web Application. WSS_Content database size 20GB as before. WSS_Empty size now is close to 10GB. WSS_Content database should be shrinked by DBA. The size after shrinking will be close to 10GB.
All content databases of the Web Application are in the Stopped state
SharePoint web application consists of several content databases. Status for all of these databases is set to “Stopped”. RMSP will report an error to user.
