Large content databases - added indexes for performance improvements

Everyone that has inspected SharePoint's content database will notice that all lists and documents are stored in two tables only, AllUserData and AllDocs.

As only a few properties are contained in indexes searches will most likely lead to table-scans. Having a few 1.000 documents in SharePoint might not lead to slow performance but if you're looking at 100.000+ documents the situation is obviously different as outlined in this excellent article.

SharePoint Content Database

In case you wish to modify the SharePoint Content Database through SQL rather than using Microsoft SharePoint API you might wish to start reading this blog.

SharePoint SQL Lists

Having worked with SharePoint Lists for a while, we realized that they are not suited for enterprise applications - but for ad-hoc data capture and sharing.

Entity-Relation diagrams and other data modelling techniques can be leveraged in standard SQL, but can be exposed as Lists in SharePoint with automatic forms where needed. Various web parts are available for creating data, as well as maintaining relations between entities.

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