What to do with a Large SharePoint Content Database

hmmm... Wondering  what to do with  the content database size that has already exceeded supported size limit (200 GB) and you want to create a new site collection. There are multiple choices available, you can give it a shot:-

Choice#1 :

• Deleting unnecessary sites and old document versions using SharePoint Object Model.
• For deleting old versions of SharePoint file, custom coding might be necessary as SharePoint do not provide this utility OOTB. Fortunately, there are some solutions out therehttp://www.sharepointfix.com/2009/10/delete-older-versions-new-sharepoint.html
  http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31481306/programmatically-delete-file-versions-across-a-site-collection.aspx

Choice#2

• Shrinking the data base in SQL server, it may have a lot of unoccupied space.

DBCC SHRINKFILE (, )

Or

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE

Run sp_filestream_force_garbage_collection (Transact-SQL) to force the garbage collector to delete any files that are no longer needed in File streaming container.

Choice#3

Move existing site collection to other database and this will reduce size.

Run below command to get the site info along with content database sizes :-

stsadm -o enumsites -url http://sitecollectionURL >> d:\siteinfo.xml

Or

To create the list of all site collection in that Content database then use this,

Get-SPSite -ContentDatabase "WSS_Content_"| foreach($site in $_.sites)

Now from the Site info file created in d drive you can identify the site collection that you

want to move to a separate database.

Move-SPSite <http://ServerName/Sites/SiteName> -DestinationDatabase

• <http://ServerName/Sites/SiteName> is the name of the site collection.

• is the name of the destination content database.

Stsadm -o mergecontentdbs -url -sourcedatabasename -destinationdatabasename -operation 3 -filename

Choice#4  Keep the old large databases as it is and create new site collections in a separate database:-

stsadm -o createsiteinnewdb -url  http://sitecollectionURL 

                                          -ownerlogin domain\username 

                                          -owneremail emailid     

                                          -lcid 1033 

                                          -sitetemplate STS#0  

                                          -title sitecollectiontitle 

                                          -description sitecollectiondescription

                                          -databasename DBname

Note: We cannot split a site collection  into  multiple databases.