Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010: Best Practices

Exchange Mailbox Services Architecture

A database schema is the definition of how the data is stored in the database file. As shown in Table 6-1, in all earlier versions of Exchange Server, each database has a mailbox, folder, message, and attachment table. These tables are used to store all information for all mailboxes in the database. This provides the ability to only store a message and attachment once for each of the mailboxes in the database. The previous database schema also includes a table for each folder to store the item contents of each folder.

Table 6-1. Exchange Server 2007 Table Structure

		PER DATABASE		PER FOLDER
MAILBOX TABLE	FOLDER TABLE	MESSAGE TABLE	ATTACHMENT TABLE	MESSAGE/FOLDER TABLE
Terry	Terry: Sent Items ...