Shrinking Ginormous SharePoint Database Transaction Log Files

I’m sure by now most of you have encountered SharePoint databases that have a SQL Server database data file (.mdf) at a size that is as little as several hundred MB’s, yet the associated log file (.ldf) is ginormous and may be GB’s in size. This ginormous transaction log file will continue to grow until the drive containing the transaction log (t-log) runs out of disk space. At this point there is no room for transactions to be added to the t-log, so users cannot perform insert, update, or delete actions in SharePoint. This restriction is applied because every type of SQL data modification is first written to the transaction log and… Read More

Continue Reading

Moving or Renaming a Web Application Content Database

When creating a web application in SharePoint 2013 it will communicate with SQL Server to create the supporting content database. Depending on what steps are used to create the Web Apps it sometimes creates the SharePoint database with a not-so-‘friendly’ database name and it may contain a ginormous GUID, (which I pronounce Goo-id) as part of the database name. When working with these databases it can become challenging to specify the name of the database within PowerShell or SQL Server so you’ll want to rename the database to a more user-friendly name. You may also decide you need to move the database to a different location on your hard drives, but you don’t want to recreate the Web… Read More

Continue Reading

Renaming the GUID-Challenged Central Administration Database

The Central Administration content database that is created during the installation of your SharePoint farm is probably the second most important database, with the SharePoint Configuration database being the first most important, so it is imperative that you are able to easily reference this database when performing administrative tasks.  If you perform the SharePoint installation using the GUI the Central Admin database is created with a not-so-user-friendly name that includes a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). This name makes it challenging to work with when writing scripts that reference the database because of the GUID included in the name of this database.  You can avoid the GUID from being applied to… Read More

Continue Reading