Inside the Information Store

Inside the Information Store

In Exchange V4.0 and V5.0 a restriction imposed by the design of the database prevents an Information Store database growing past 16GB. When the limit was first designed 16GB was possibly a limit that seemed to be well in advance of anything that people would need to use. As we?ve seen, the ever-expanding size of messages and attachments has driven the requirement to support larger stores much faster than people might have expected. A server in DIGITAL reached a 15.5GB Private Information Store in early 1997, after roughly 6 months of production activity. Spirited use of the EDBUTIL utility to compact the store and judicious transfer of user mailboxes to other servers managed to keep the server from hitting the magic 16GB limit, but there?s no doubt that production servers hit the design limits sooner than many expected.

Exchange V5.5 silenced all the discussions about the size limitation for an individual database. The theoretical limit is now 16TB, a size that is so far in advance of the largest disk volume supported by Windows NT now and in the foreseeable future that Microsoft is quite correct to refer to this as the ?unlimited store.? In early 1998 the expectation was that the largest store that would be put into production in this millennium would be less than 125GB. Given the operational challenges involved in maintaining very large files I doubt that anyone will rush to be the first to have a store larger than 100GB, but...

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Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5: Planning, Design, and Implementation

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