Since, most of us ignore the site collection basics and seldom plan our site collection content database storage needs. We are often unaware of SharePoint limitations in terms of content storage which affects our design at a later point in time.
Here is the simple yet very powerful stsadm command to create a site collection with a separate content database:
stsadm -o createsiteinnewdb -url http://webspinners/dept/hr -owneremail SharePoint@webspinners.com -ownerlogin Webspinners\SPAdmin -sitetemplate sts -title “Human Resources” -databaseserver "SERVER5" -databasename “HR Content Database”
In this example, a new site collection is created at the URL http://webspinners/dept/hr.
The Site Collection Owner is set to Webspinners\SPAdmin and the Site Collection owner email is set to SharePoint@webspinners.com.
The default team site template is used to create the site (the template is simply named ‘sts’, without the quotes.)
The database server is SERVER5 and the name of the database created is HR Content Database.
There are some reasons, why you could have a different content databases per site collections:
1. MS recommends to have content database not more the 100Gb for MOSS 2007 and 200GB for SP 2010.
2. It simplifies your backup and restore operation
3. It provides flexibility for Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy.
4. Modularity and Flexibility of data storage eliminates maintenance nightmares.
Possible Scenarios:
a. Media management for a site collection that stores heavy audio/video media files like .avi, .mpeg, .wav, .mp3
b. Knowledge Management requirement where you might think of implementing a separate KM site collection for managing thousands of word, excel, powerpoint, visio, pdf artifacts etc.
These scenarios need you to have a separate Content Database for your site collections, otherwise the overall application performance would degrade, searching these documents will be affected, backup and recovery will be a nightmare and moving these site collections into separate SP farms will be trouble some.
If you have already made the mistake of not having a separate content database store for your Site Collection, and want to move your Site Collection to a separate Content database in MOSS 2007, please follow these links :
http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/archive/2008/10/14/tips-to-create-a-site-collection-in-new-content-database.aspx
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2007/08/20/how-to-create-site-collection-in-a-specific-content-database.aspx
For moving site collection to a new Content DB in SharePoint 2010, follow directions given by Microsoft : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc825328.aspx
