technical solutions and commentary

Many companies starting out using SharePoint have deployed SharePoint using a MSDE database. As people begin getting used using SharePoint, as opposed to regular file shares, the database can begin to grow quickly as documents are placed in SharePoint. In order to provide more than 2 GB storage permitted by MSDE, you need to move to a full-blown SQL Server based datastore. Here is a useful link for information on moving (upgrading) a a SharePoint database.

If you are already running a SQL Server based datastore for SharePoint, there may be a point that you want to move the database to a new server. For example, (1) if you are using a SQL Server for hosting multiple company databases, you may want to move the SPS database to a dedicated SQL Server for performance reasons. (2) You may be running out of drive space on the SQL Server housing you SPS database. (3) You may be hosting SQL on a single server and want to move to a clustered database solution for increased reliability of SharePoint. After a couple of hours of searching, I finally located the Microsoft KB Article on how to accomplish this task.