Article updates for the April Cumulative Update

Margo Crandall — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:44:00 GMT

If you subscribe to our newly-published RSS feeds for Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server, you may have noticed a wave of topics that we updated for the April Cumulative Update.

We updated topics because the Windows SharePoint Services portion of the Cumulative Update fixes a pain point (possible data corruption and definite size limitation) in deleting, merging, and splitting content databases. From the Cumulative Update description, here's the problem, and how you can avoid it:

"If a site collection is very large, an attempt to delete the site collection from a Web application fails. This causes the stsadm -o mergecontentdbs command to fail when you try to move site collections from one content database to another. This issue is resolved by adding an optional -gradualdelete parameter to the stsadm -o deletesite command. If this parameter is present, SharePoint marks the site collection as deleted to prevent further access while a SharePoint Timer job gradually deletes the data in the site collection. After you install the hotfix package that this article describes, the stsadm -o mergecontentdbs command uses this gradual delete functionality by default."

Now that product team added the Site Collection: Delete timer job to run in the background and gradually delete anything marked as deleted, you can delete and move large site collections the way that you always wanted to!

Note: Although the Stsadm mergecontentdbs operation uses the gradual delete functionality by default after you install the hotfix, it's not the default for the Stsadm deletesite operation, so you'll need to remember specify the -gradualdelete parameter.

Here's the list of the topics that we changed as a result of the update:

Windows SharePoint Services topics	Office SharePoint Server topics
Delete a site collection (Windows SharePoint Services)	Delete a site collection (Office SharePoint Server)
Merge content databases (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0)	Merge content databases (Office SharePoint Server 2007)
Move site collections to a new database (split a content database) (Windows SharePoint Services	Move site collections to a new database (split a content database) (Office SharePoint Server 200
Back up and restore site collections by using built-in tools (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0)	Back up and restore site collections by using built-in tools (Office SharePoint Server 2007)
SharePoint Timer job reference (Office SharePoint Server)	SharePoint Timer job reference (Office SharePoint Server)
Job-gradual-site-deletion- Stsadm property (Windows SharePoint Services)	Job-gradual-site-deletion- Stsadm property (Office SharePoint Server)
Deletesite: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services)	Deletesite: Stsadm operation (Office SharePoint Server)

The Infrastructure Update

Douglas Goodwin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:22:00 GMT

The Infrastructure Update is a set of product improvements and prescriptive guidance for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Our favorite features (and the ones we’ve written the most about) include federated search,...(read more)

To the SharePoint : Updates

Article updates for the April Cumulative Update

The Infrastructure Update