How do I handle the large List with more than 5K items in SharePoint 2010?

Question

Have developed a simple request tracking application on SharePoint 2010; it stores the info on the SharePoint List. I would expect ~100items / week getting stored on the root folder of the list(as have to generate the report on demand basis).

Now, coming to archival; Is there an easy to archive the data(older than 6months) without requiring Timer service?

Answer 1

Number of items in a list as per your description not a big because SharePoint can store millions of items in a List. Only problem is the List view Threshold, Number items are returns in a view cause the issue if it breach MSFT best practice limit( 5000 items).

Their are ways to deal with large with i.e using the index column, metadata columns etc

Here is few good articals which will help you to manage the large lists:

Video: Techniques for managing large lists

Manage lists and libraries with many items

Designing large lists and maximizing list performance (SharePoint Server 2010)

For the Archiving You can use the retention Policy features, instead of deleting the items, move them into different location.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2011/10/12/policy-and-retention-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFII7FUxlOQ

Answer 2

The SharePoint boundaries document (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787%28v=office.14%29.aspx) states that a list can contain 30,000,000 items.

The query threshold is 5,000 items per operation. By default, a list view will request only 30 items per page, which is well below the threshold.

Unless you alter the views, you should not have any supportability issues. But I strongly suggest that you monitor performance of the database server and scale as necessary.

Answer 3

To get around it with the client Object Model you can use this code snippet, it uses item pos to leverage getting more than 5000K items. if you need VB.NET or more in-depth breakdown this is the site for you here The Snippet is from here

List list = ClientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("Assets");
ListItemCollectionPosition itemPosition = null;
while (true) {
CamlQuery camlQuery = new CamlQuery();
camlQuery.ListItemCollectionPosition = itemPosition;
camlQuery.ViewXml = "<View>" + Constants.vbCr + Constants.vbLf + "<ViewFields>" +     Constants.vbCr + Constants.vbLf + "<FieldRef Name='Id'/><FieldRef Name='Title'/><FieldRef Name='Serial_No'/><FieldRef Name='CRM_ID'/>" + Constants.vbCr + Constants.vbLf + "</ViewFields>" + Constants.vbCr + Constants.vbLf + "<RowLimit>2201</RowLimit>" + Constants.vbCr + Constants.vbLf + "</View>";
ListItemCollection listItems = list.GetItems(camlQuery);
clientcontext.Load(listItems);
clientcontext.ExecuteQuery();
itemPosition = listItems.ListItemCollectionPosition;
foreach (ListItem listItem in listItems) {
Console.WriteLine("Item Title: {0} Item Key: {1} CRM ID: {2}", listItem("Title"), listItem("Serial_x0020_No_x002e_"), listItem("CRM_ID"));
}
if (itemPosition == null) {
break; // TODO: might not be correct. Was : Exit While
}
Console.WriteLine(itemPosition.PagingInfo);
Console.WriteLine();
}