'Very' large DA customer database

[Aaron_Mears]

EV2007 - SP5 / DA 2007 - SP5 / SQL2005 64-Bit / Exchange 2007 Premium Journaling

I have a DA customer database that is 200GB, and it seems to be growing about 3-5GB/day.  ~ 10,000 custodians and 100+ cases with Legal Holds.

I have 2 general questions because we are filling up the current drive and I want to act before a crisis occurs.

1) How big it too big for a DA customer database and what do you do when it gets too big?

2) I can allocate more SAN, but should I be looking at splitting the database across drives and if so, what is the best practice?  How exactly do you do this, what tables to split, etc.


Any advise would be appreciated.

Thanks

--Aaron

[Liam_Finn1]

First do you do compression on the database and logs and do a reorg on the database and clear the white space in the there?

200GB is really not too big and in most cases this is mainly white space which can be recovered with a good maintenance plan

The issue you would mostly run into is performance when it is so big. The easiest way around performance is to house the database on a RAID 10 LUN and give it plenty of spindles so you have high IO when needed

One way to manage the size of the database is to create more than one customer database (one database for each section of law) that way you can bring your databases into a more manageable size. It also gives you the ability to be more granular on who has access to which database.