SPS Boston: SharePoint 2010 Search Driven Design Patterns: Better Portal Designs with Fewer Compromises

Event:
SharePoint Saturday Boston
Saturday, April 9th, 2011

Session Title:
SharePoint 2010 Search Driven Design Patterns: Better Portal Designs with Fewer Compromises

Abstract:
When designing a SharePoint 2010 Intranet, collaboration portal, or business process solution we are faced with many decisions and challenges. While our objectives for user experience, information architecture, security model, and administrative model are driven primarily by business requirements, technology limitations tend to force certain decisions on us.  This session explores search driven portal design patterns and explains how we can leverage the SharePoint Server 2010 Search feature area in creative ways, leading to better portal designs with fewer compromises.

Slides:

20110730 0100PM SharePoint Saturday Search Driven Design Patterns - Bisciotti.pdf

Naming Convention for SharePoint Databases

Naming conventions are obviously important to SharePoint farms.  Having a naming convention drastically improves efficiency related to configuration tasks, troubleshooting, documentation, and knowledge transfer.  While I use naming conventions for various aspects of a SharePoint farm, this post explains a naming convention I use for SharePoint databases.

Here it is:
FarmAbbreviation_DatabaseCategory_Component_InstanceNumber_DatabaseType_InstanceNumber

Farm Abbreviation:  A consistent abbreviation used to prefix all objects in a farm including IIS Application Pool, IIS Web Site, IIS Web Site directory, and databases.
Database Category:  WebApp for Web Application and SvcApp for Service Application.
Component:  Name of the Web Application or name of the Service Application.
Instance Number:  Two digit, incremental number of component instance.
Database Type:  For Web Applications, this is ContentDB.  Some service applications use multiple databases so Database Type describes which one it is.
Instance Number:  Two digit, incremental number of Database Type.

Examples:

The first content database for a Web Application named "Intranet", in a Farm abbreviated as "SPF01" would read as follows:
SPF01_WebApp_Intranet_01_ContentDB_01

An additional content database added to the "Intranet" Web Application would be incremented by 1, as follows:
SPF01_WebApp_Intranet_01_ContentDB_02

The Reporting database of a Web Analytics Service Application would read like this:
SPF01_SvcApp_WebAnalytics_01_ReportingDB_01

SharePoint 4.0: PowerShell Get-SPDatabase | Select Name

This is just a quick tip about using PowerShell to retrieve a list of SharePoint databases.  When you run Get-SPDatabase, you are provided the Name, Id, and Type of SharePoint databases.  However, by default, the entire name might not be legible.

While there are extensive ways to do formatting in PowerShell, some times you just need a quick command to read the database names in entirety.  So, if you run Get-SPDatabase | Select Name, only the database name is brought in entirety.