can SharePoint Database maintenance activities invalidate Microsoft support?

Question

We are maintaining SharePoint 2013 standard version in our production environment with managing large content of data in content databases.

We have one large content database with size 250 GB and consists of two site collections . So we planned to move one site with size 100GB to single content database.

After moving the site to separate content database, our DBA is planning to run maintenance jobs like shrink operation to reclaim the space from content database of initial size 250 GB.

Here is technet reference for DB maintenance activities link

Is shrink and other DB maintenance activities are supported from Microsoft end? Will these actions invalidate Microsoft support to our farm?

Answer 1

Shrinking is perfectly fine to do without any risk of invalidating support, considering you read and follow the article you linked.

For "other DB maintenance activities", I'd perhans double check if they are mentioned anywhere in the documentation, but this article gives pretty good idea of what types of activities invalidate support - anything that changes the schema of the database.

Answer 2

Shrinking the data files is supported for Microsoft SharePoint as mentioned in your article.

But: Shrinking a DataFile is a worst-case-action from a performance-perspective.

There is a much better solution for SharePoint:

• Create another empty ContentDatabase and presize it to your needs.
• Move the second SiteCollection to the newly created Database with the Move-SPSite PowerShell command
• Now your initial 250GB Database is completely empty. You can safely delete it.