SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Managing Large Lists

As you have seen so far, managing small lists is fairly easy. Over time, though, at least some of your lists will begin to grow and finally come to hold a large number of items. There are several ways to manage and organize very large lists in SharePoint.

These techniques are meant for lists that exceed 1,000 items. Once a list gets to be that size, the list or the site as a whole will suffer from a degradation of performance. This isn't caused by the existence of the list but by the volume of user activities on the list.

In theory, you can store millions of items in a list, but if you don't take steps to manage that volume, your list and site will slow to a crawl. The following are some methods for managing very large lists.

Indexing a List Column

Indexing a list column allows SharePoint to more quickly analyze data in that column, speeding up the process of accessing list items. Indexing goes hand in hand with filtering, but there are a few caveats. First of all, when you filter a view, the first filtered column must be a column that is indexed. Although you can index more than one column in a list, the more columns you index, the greater the performance hit on your database. Try to index only one column to receive the best results, or at least index only those columns that are frequently accessed:

1. Open the list, either by clicking the list's name in Quick Launch or clicking View All Site Content and then clicking on the list's name.

2. Click Settings and select List ...