SharePoint Content Database Restrictions... There are none!
There have been a few questions lately around both numbers of sites per database for Windows SharePoint Services v2 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and size of a content database. The plans for WSS v3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have the same guidance.
Number of Site Collections in a Content Database:
There are no restrictions built into any version of the of the SharePoint Products & Technologies. See SQL servers upper limits on MSDN.
Note: A content database can scale well to 50,000 site collections. There’s no magic line at 50K, but you may start to notice some overall throughput degradation as you go beyond 50,000.
Size of a Content Database:
There are no size restrictions built in. See SQL servers upper limits on MSDN.
Note: A SharePoint content database can get substantially larger than 50GB. Microsoft IT provided guidance of ~ 50 GB for WSSv2 / SPS2003 content databases – this guidance came from the need for quick recovery of documents and site collections. Properly configured WSSv3 and MOSS 2007 installations should be able to handle TB sized content DBs.
One of the main considerations with scaling out to large databases is the high availability, disaster recovery, and backup methods. If you are leveraging snapshots in SQL 2005 and/or SQL log shipping it is very reasonable to scale to larger database sizes. The main point is that SLAs can be achieved with smaller or larger databases with proper planning.
Joel Oleson
Sr. Technical Product Manager - Office Servers
