Third-party software that splits large content Db into multiple files?

Question

This question is necessarily vague, and I apologize in advanced for that. Somewhere on this stackexchange I saw an answer that referred to using third-party applications that can split a large content database (3TB in my case) into multiple smaller files. The context led me to believe this was something on the SQL side rather than SharePoint side, and the closest I've been able to find is file-groups and file splitting, both of which I find somewhat confusing. This question may be closed for being too broad, but I figured it was worth a shot.

Is there a third-party application or SQL functionality that can break a single content database into multiple MDF files, similar in nature to a ZIP file?

The bulk of the content cannot be moved into a separate site collection, so that is not an option.

Answer 1

It is always recommended for large databases that you use multiple data files. It will help in performance, but makes it tough for backup and restore activity.

For new DB:

• Only create files in the primary filegroup for the database.
• Distribute the files across separate disks.
• The number of data files should be less than or equal to the number of core CPUs. Count dual core processors as two CPUs for this purpose. Count each processor that supports hyper-threading as a single CPU.
• Create data files of equal size. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298801%28v=office.14%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

You can use the Alterdatabase statment to split it. Read more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/alter-database-transact-sql-file-and-filegroup-options

But I would also recommend, it is hard to manage single site collection with this much data. You should do couple of things:

• delete the old data or create a new site collection and archive data over there.
• Split the site collection into multiple site collections using powershell or 3rd party tools.

Answer 2

No. The smallest entity to break out into it's own database is a site collection. You cannot have multiple databases for one site collection. You need to look into extracting sites/ subsites/ libraries and putting them into it's own site collection categorizes by group, division, or other organizational unit.

You can use PowerShell, or a 3rd party application to move content like that over to its own site collection and thus, to another content db, but it seems as though it's going to be quite the headache. I'd also look into retention and moving files that are older than X amount of months to an archive site collection, possibly using a timer job or custom retention information management policy.