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I came in the other morning to loads of reports of errors with sharepoint 2010.



After a while I found out the errors were only showing when people tried to add things to the database like files or announcements. On looking at the logs we have this error message

Code:

Source: MSSQL$SHAREPOINT
CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because the resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 4096 MB per database

Now when I installed sharepoint 2010 originally I'm sure I put on the SQL server enterprise edition which shouldn't have these limits so I checked the server and sure enough SQL server 2008 full edition was installed. So after a few hours of googling I saw many reports of people with the same trouble. What seems to have happened is that I installed Sharepoint using the "Standalone" option. Now to me that makes perfect sense because I wanted all the SQL server and sharepoint components on one server. But apparently this option is just for people testing sharepoint on for example a development laptop. It installs a seperate version of SQL express and doesn't recognize if SQL server full edition is installed.

So we've been using sharepoint for 6 months in a full production environment using SQL server express!! Oh dear.

I found this blog post which had a solution, it says to run the SQL upgrade with a special upgrade switch

Code:

setup.exe SKUUPGRADE=1

Great! but this only works with SQL 2005.

After a few more hours googling it turns out that the 2008 version actually has an upgrade button under the "maintenance" category in the main setup.exe. I ran this and it upgraded SQL express to enterprise no problems at all. I then ran the SQL server SP2 patch and my Sharepoint is running again





So Microsoft please change the wording of the Sharepoint standalone option in the installer to give a clear warning about the 4GB limit and that it wont automatically find the full SQL server. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has fallen into this trap.