Deleting Large Sites and Recovering from the Failed Deletion of a Site

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Apparently you cannot delete a site containing a large amount of content in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Last week I deleted -- or rather, attempted to delete – a Document Center site in our Test environment in order to recreate it (to fix some bugs in our document migration process). Unfortunately, the deleteweb.aspx page timed out and left the database in an inconsistent state -- attempts to browse to the site (https://server/Archive/Library) returned HTTP 400 – Bad Request. The "deleted" site showed up in the list of site collections in Central Administration (although you could not select it in order to delete it) but it did not show up in “stsadm –o enumsites”. Attempts to recreate the site (upon activation of one of our custom features) also failed with the following error:

The system cannot find the path specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070003)

Something similar happened last month on my initial deployment to TEST (I pressed CTRL+C while activating one of the features that creates sites and ended up corrupting the database). At that time I simply deleted the Web application and recreated it.

We are planning on rebuilding our Test environment at least once sometime during the next couple of weeks. However, I did not want to perform a rebuild last week since it would interrupt the Test team (i.e. the /Archive/Library site is only a fraction of the feature set we were currently testing and we have several hundred gigabytes of content in other site collections to support the testing of those features). I was prepared to delete the entire Web application but only as a last resort.

Since my goal was to get TEST up and running as quickly as possible, I ended up using SQL Profiler while browsing the Central Administration page that listed my defunct site. This showed me that the site was still listed in the SiteMap table of the SharePoint_Config database. I then ran the following statement to remove the site:

 DELETE FROM SiteMap
WHERE Id = 'A4E86B02-49E1-4960-843E-125BB13D6C54'

This allowed me to activate the feature again which recreated the /Archive/Library site. It is important to note that executing SQL statements directly against any SharePoint database is completely unsupported (meaning you shouldn't bother calling PSS once you have directly made any updates to the database). However, in our case, this risk was mitigated by the fact that we’ll be deleting the databases during a rebuild soon. Otherwise, I definitely would have opted to open a case with PSS and let them guide us through the resolution of the issue.

So...lessons learned:

  • Do not use the Web application to delete a large site (e.g. a Document Center with lots of content) since it could timeout and leave your SharePoint databases in an inconsistent state; use "stsadm.exe -o deletesite" or "stsadm.exe -o deleteweb" instead
  • Not all data for a particular Web application is stored in the content database (e.g. WSS_Content); a small amount of data about the site is also stored in SharePoint_Config
  • Deleting a site does not perform a distributed transaction across the content database and the configuration database (the root of the issue when deleting a large site)