SharePoint DB GUID cleanup

With the help of well-publicized articles by Todd Klindt and his bro-crusher Shane Young, I had some admin time today to work on getting my environment set in order. Our Production SP2010 environment was put in place by consultants, which means, amongst other things, databases with long, frilly names.

For reference, see here. (Pictures hosted from the dead SharePoint911 server, go poke Shane about migrating his blog content to Rackspace!)

Shane's article on the Search Service Application DBs indicated that on a vanilla, non-used database, migrating your Crawl Store and Property Store DBs took a base of six minutes. When my databases were going upwards of 25 minutes, I decided to look into it more closely. As it turns out (this isn't entirely unexpected), when SharePoint creates its replacement databases, it ignores the Model DB settings and sets its growth to the agonizing standard of 1 MB increments...and then of course, it proceeds to jam all your old search terms/cache into that DB, one MB at a time.

Save yourself some agony - if you plan to do this yourself, once you apply your changes to the topology, open SQL Server Management Studio and fix the growth settings on both DBs to save yourself present and future headaches.