Containerizing items and retaining IDs in MOSS 2007

Question

I work in a corporate environment and we have had the following "rule" announced following Microsoft recommendations:

1. No list or library can have more than 10,000 items
2. No list or library can have a container that contains more than 2,000 items

For number one, that's no problem (easy to split with migration tools) although for number two I've ran into issues that I cannot seem to solve...

If it is a library, that's fine easy enough to "containerize" the documents into folder to make sure that there is no container with more than 2,000 items.

The issue is with lists, which have approx 20,000 items in and grow pretty fast (issue lists etc.). The problem here is that they have IDs associated and these IDs must be retained. To make matters worse, versioning is also turned on.

For the above reason, I cannot see how I can possibly comply with point 2 above.

I know I can:

Split the list into 10 different lists with a migration tool (that does keep the ID reference) but I can see this getting messy fast as the lists are constantly growing.

I know I cannot:

Put them into folders to "containerize" them as I will lose the IDs.

So my question is, is restricting each view to return less than 2,000 items classed as containerizing?

Also are there any other options to retain ID, and containerize these list items into groups of 2,000 or less?

Please note I do not have the option to do this programatically although I do have access to Metalogix migration tools.

Answer 1

The important thing is to keep the retrieval of rows for the SQL table containing items below 2000 (5000 if SQL Server 2008).

This is due to Sql Server escalating it's locks to table level when you pass that treshold.

So if you can limit the selection of items in you views to below 2000 based on selection criteria then having 100,000 items in the list is no issue. But if you do some sorting and limit number of items by count then you'll run into problems.