Hello,
I have a SharePoint 2007 database that is 16GB in size and I want to know why, and how I can reduce the size. Ideally I would like a trimmed replica to use as a developer workstation that retains a good sample data set, and has the ability to be refreshed.
Can you please tell me if there are any third party tools or other methods to accomplish this? I have found the Microsoft tool (stsadm) to be very limited in this regard.
Many thanks.
You can start with the Storage Space Allocation page, available in every site collection.. http://server/_layouts/storman.aspx That can tell you what lists are big etc. Trashcans are also good candidates for trimming a database. I regularly make backups of every site collection and just inspect the ones that get too big. It's always something; large PPTs or loads of images, etc.
Ultimately SQL Server will not just automatically shrink your database, so if you delete stuff the filesize on disk will not decrease; this is a SQL Server admin task.
16 GB is not that big really.. you can just backup and restore it in your dev environment and then delete some unneeded site(collection)s out of it to make it smaller.