I've written about it before, but the problem remains. Deleting a very large (78gb) SharePoint document library will get you in trouble. The delete works fine; flushing it from the page recycle bin works like a charm. But thirty days later, when SharePoint's Empty Recyle Bin job tries to really, truly delete it from the second stage recyle bin, and thus from the SqlServer database, your users will be locked out of SharePoint for two hours before the job throws up its figurative hands in despair and aborts. The next night, the same thing happens. And the next…
Opening a ticket with Microsoft gave me a better understanding of the problem, but the darn library and its contents are still there. I know they could write a T-SQL procedure to do the job. I just know it. I could do it myself, except I don't know all of the interrelationships of the various SharePoint tables in the content database. And I don't trust my T-SQL skills. Oh yeah, and it would violate my warranty and Microsoft would never help me again. The only "suported solution" they could give me was to restore the library to its original page and delete the documents one by one, flushing the recycle bins every few hundred documents or so. Did I mention that there are over 100,000 of them? *sigh*
Now I hear that Service Pack 2 for WSS and MOSS are being released today. My MS tech recommends that I try it (on my development system, of course!) because it should solve my problem. Boy, wouldn't that be nice. I'll keep you updated.
Update: read this
cwogle