Chris Ogle's Down-home SharePoint Ruminations

So I have this existing SharePoint 2003 site, and holy cow the users are actually putting documents into it! We work with projects around here and so we have hundreds of site collections, one for each project, each one stuffed to the gills with documents, announcements, links, and other detritus. Yep, the users are using, and the content database size is up to 30 gigs with no end to the growth in sight.

Now these projects have certain kinds of documents, such as project workpapers or project reports, that recur all the time, and each type has approval processes that go with it, so when I heard about SharePoint 2007 content types and workflow, I got excited and spent hours with the users, planning the approval workflows to go with each new content type. I was happier than a watchdog in a butcher shop. Of course, content types don't work across site collections, so when I migrate to 2007, I'll have to consolidate my hundreds of site collections into one. No problem, right?

Then I read articles like this one that tell me that SQL Server recommends 30 gb as a maximum database size, so I decide I need to look into using multiple content databases. Uh-oh. You can put multiple site collections into one content database, but you can't split one site collection across multiple content databases.

 Now I'm more frustrated than a prosthetic limb salesman at a snake convention. I have to use multiple content databases for performance, but I can't because I'll lose my workflow. I presented my dilemma to some big-name presenters at the recent SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, and the response was "Hmmm…sounds like a problem." Is anybody else in this pickle?

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