Datasheet

SharePoint SiteS and databaSeS

Keep in mind that these are the web applications that are created during simple Standalone

SharePoint installation. You can create more if you’d like. If you inherit a SharePoint server and

ﬁnd that more than three web applications are being used by SharePoint, that’s ﬁne. Someone

probably added more for a good reason (see Chapter 10 for more information about how and

why to create additional web applications) or enabled additional services, and now you are

responsible for them. Congratulations.

th e sh a r e Po I n t Da t a b a s e s

SharePoint, of course, creates databases during the course of its installation. Each SharePoint web

application needs at least one content database to contain its data. The Central Administration

web application also accesses the server farm’s conﬁguration database (which stands to reason,

because that is where all the conﬁguration settings are for SharePoint). Because SharePoint is

capable of performing full-text, site-collection-wide searches, Search also has its own database. In

addition, there will be a logging database, as well as a database for Business Data Connectivity.

This means that six databases will be created when SharePoint is installed as a Standalone

server (meaning most services will be enabled and conﬁgured automatically). The following list

describes them using the default names. When you do a Complete installation, you can choose

to specify the database names if you need a different naming convention. However, even for the

Complete installation, SharePoint will suggest the default names below.

SharePoint_Conﬁg_(GUID) This is the conﬁguration database for SharePoint. It holds

all the conﬁguration data and settings for the entire server farm. What makes separate

SharePoint servers all members of the same server farm is that all of them use the same

conﬁguration database. This makes it possible for all those servers to have the same conﬁgu-

ration settings. When you do a standalone server installation, the database will be called

SharePoint_Conﬁg_(a string of random alphanumerics to generate a unique global ID or

GUID). If you do a server farm installation, the suggested default (which you can easily

change) is simply SharePoint_Conﬁg.

WSS_Search_Servername This is the database that contains all the search data acquired

when the index (or content access) service crawled through the SharePoint site collection.

Search is an interesting beast in SharePoint, both overly simple and potentially complex.

WSS_Content This is usually the content database for the ﬁrst web application made in

SharePoint for SharePoint sites (it’s the default, unless you are doing a Complete installation

and choose to name it something else). It will contain information about the site collections

that the web application contains, and it will contain all the list, library, and web part meta-

data, documents, and attachments. Keep in mind that you can have more than one content

database for a web application, and it easy to grow out of the ﬁrst one pretty quickly.

SharePoint_AdminContent_(GUID) This is the content database for the Central

Administration web application. Because the Central Administration website is just like

any other SharePoint website, it is prone to the same strengths and weaknesses. Site set-

tings can be changed, including those for the master page. Novices should not do this. As

a matter of fact, no one should. They could potentially delete the document library folder

containing the help ﬁles and more.

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