Moving Site Collection between Content Databases in SharePoint 2010

Moving Site Collection to another Content Database in SharePoint  2010

We had a requirement to have the existing site collection to be moved to a new dedicated content database for various reasons in a test environment.

Before performing this check the:

• Site Collection Size
• Disk Space free on the Database server
• Whether Audit data needs to be moved
• Solutions in use on this Site Collection 
• Backup of the Existing Content - just in case something goes wrong but this task is fairly simple it depends on the importance of the site collection.

 Here are the steps performed to accomplish this on the test environment:

1)     Create a New Content Database

Syntax: New-SPContentDatabase -Name <ContentDbName> -WebApplication <WebApplicationName>

Example: New-SPContentDatabase -Name WSS_Content_ProjectCentre -WebApplication ‘ContosoWeb’

2)    Move the Site Collection to a new content database

Syntax: Move-SPSite http://servername/sites/sitename -DestinationDatabase ContentDb2

Example: Move-SPSite http://portal.contoso.com/sites/projectcentre -DestinationDatabase WSS_Content_ProjectCentre

Note: This doesn’t move the audit data if you have this in use, you have to use the other PowersShell commands please refer to the technet article.

3)     Run IISRESET to see the changes in Central Admin

4)     To Validate this:

Get-SPSite -ContentDatabase WSS_Content_ProjectCentre