Applies to: SharePoint

If you want to choose which Content Database to use when creating a new Site Collection you will have to use Powershell. There are some crazy solutions out there that tell you to do things like detach all other content databases or adjust the site limits to force SharePoint to pick your Content Database, but in a production environment that is usually not possible – not to mention stupid.

You can do all of this with the stsadm tool in SharePoint 2007, but I won’t be covering that here. But a good reference to figure out what commands match the powershell ones can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621081.aspx

If you already have a Content Database you’d like to use, then skip ahead. Otherwise you can create a new Content Database pretty easy in Powershell using this command:

New-SPContentDatabase -Name MyNewSite_Content -WebApplication http://mysharepointsite.com

One of the main irritations with creating a new Site Collection from Powershell rather than the GUI is, although you gain the ability to specify the Content Database, you have to specify the site template by internal name. To get the internal names of all the Site Templates available, use this command:

Get-SPWebTemplate

But for the lazy (me), I’ve put a quick list of most of the templates and their internal names (For English sites – 1033) at the end of this article.

To create the new Site Collection while specifying the Content Database use the following command:

New-SPSite http://mysharepointsite.com/sites/mynewsite -OwnerAlias "MyDomain\MyUser" -ContentDatabase MyNewSite_Content -Name "My New Site!" -Template "STS#0"

That’s it! There’s a bunch of other parameters for the New-SPSite command you can specify (Like Description), but that’s the basic syntax.

Default Installed Templates and their internal Names: