SharePoint Lover

For planning purposes, it's wise to be able to find out how much your content databases have grown so as to avoid performance and backup issues on a SharePoint farm. Being able to determine how large your sites have grown, how many site collections exist is always important to a SharePoint Administrator. More importantly, knowing the current size of your database will help you during migration planning.

The 2 main ways of doing this are via Central Administration (although this doesn't give you a full picture of your database size – and also it's really cumbersome trying to find out how many site collections exist in a web application with several site collections (e.g. My Sites)

Trying to filter through several My Sites is cumbersome

The second method is to Log on to the SQL Server SQL Instance and then right click on the content database and look for the database size. This will give you the database size that you need but not other information i.e. Site Collections.

A far more all inclusive way of getting this information is by using STSADM. Although there are plans to depreciate this so as to get everyone using Powershell commands, to date, STSADM still works on SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. The STSADM command to use is "enumsites" i.e. Enumerate Sites. When you run the STSADM command it will store the results in a notepad file in the BIN folder(i.e. the SharePoint hive). Follow the instructions below:

1. Log on to the SharePoint Server

    

2. Open up the Bin Folder (as follows)

• For SharePoint 2007 Use C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin
• For SharePoint 2010 Use C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\bin
• For SharePoint 2013 Use C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\15\bin

1. Right click on the Command Prompt and click on "Run as an Administrator"

   

2. The Command Prompt will now focus default to the System 32 folder

   

    

3. Change the directory to the BIN folder (where the STSADM command actually resides) by entering and pressing return

   CD C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin

    

   

    

4. Type in the following command and then press return (replace your webapplication with your own web application)

    

   stsadm -o enumsites -url http://yourwebapplication > enumsites.txt

    

5. If this has been typed in correctly, open up the BIN folder that you had navigated to in Step 2 and a new text file would be created called "enumsites"

    

   

  6.  This would now contain all the details of the web application including how many site collections,                 the size and  name of the database