SharePoint® 2010 Administration: Instant Reference

Manage Content Databases

A content database is the storage container for site collections. As covered in Chapter 3, a site collection is stored in its entirety within a single content database. A content database can hold one or more site collections.

Content databases are powerful, but managing them is easy. All the main operations, such as adding, removing, and configuring content databases, are possible using both Central Administration and PowerShell.

Adding a Content Database

Here are reasons for needing to add a new content database:

• Creating a new web application
• Scaling out to a new SQL server, as covered in Chapter 5, “Scaling and High Availability”
• Segregating certain site collections for organizational, security, or regulation purposes ...