Content Database Consideration During Provisioning a new PWA Instance In Project Server

If you are deploying a Project Web App instance to a new web application, you can use the default web application content database to hold the new Project Web App site collection.

But I recommend to isolate the PWA content database from Web Application content database to avoid the following issues:

• Performance Issue,
  • If you are going to use the default web application content database for all future PWA site collections that will be used heavily to archive documents,
  • So that you will face a fast growing for the main content database size that might reach quickly to be more than the max recommended Content Database size that is 200 GB,
  • In this case, if the content database size was increasing to become more than 200 GB, this will effect on the farm performance.
• Availability Issue,
  • If the main web application content database stopped or destroyed it will lead to that all PWA Instances goes down. (High Risk).
• Maintenance Issue,
  • Requirements for backup and restore may not be met by the native SharePoint Server 2013 backup for content databases larger than 200 GB.
  • If you tried to backup and restore a big content database size, backup and restore operations can take a long time and are at risk of failure.

To avoid falling into these problemsو you should perform the following operations.

• Before creating the first new PWA site collection, you should lock down the current web application content database to isolate the PWA content database from the main web application content database.
  • Note: if the web application contains more than one content database, you will need to lock down all web application content databases.
• After creating the first new PWA site collection, you should lock down the new PWA content database to avoid having additional PWA site collections in the future.

To lock down a content database follow the mentioned steps below:

• Open Central Administration as farm account.

• Go to Application Management > below Databases, Manage Content Database.

• Make Sure that you specified the web application that will hold the PWA instance.

• Click on the content database name that you want to lock.
• Below Database Capacity Settings > Update the values as shown below.

• Add a new content database “WSS_Content_PWA” that hold the PWA site collection.
• The new PWA site collection should now be created with its independent content database “WSS_Content_PWA”.

• After the new PWA instance has been created, you should also lock down its content database to avoid having additional PWA site collections in the future.

Alternative Lockdown solution

• You can also set the database status to offline that mean no new site collections can be created to this content database.

Enjoy:)