SharePoint 2010 Database Names

While SharePoint Server 2010 has several enhancements for Administrators including such capabilities of an offline database restoring a list item or document, there are still some curiosities that I’ve got as to the planning of the underlying system.

For instance, it would seem that for such a refined product with so many enhancements that items such as the underlying databases might follow a naming convention of some sort. For a standard SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise edition installation, out of the box you’ll have the following databases:

Application_Registry_Service_DB_GUID
Bdc_Service_DB_GUID
Managed Metadata Service_GUID
PerformancePoint Service Application_GUID
Search_Service_Application_CrawlStoreDB_GUID
Search_Service_Application_DB
Search_Service_Application_PropertyStoreDB_GUID
Secure_Store_Service_DB_GUID
SharePoint_AdminContent_GUID
SharePoint_Config
StateService_GUID
User Profile Service Application_ProfileDB_GUID
User Profile Service Application_SocialDB_GUID
User Profile Service Application_SyncDB_GUID
WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB_GUID
WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_StagingDB_GUID
WordAutomationServices_GUID
WSS_Content
WSS_Logging

As you can see, the naming convention seems to vary dependent on the team within the product group that was developing the capability, feature set or workload.  For instance, some of the databases include an “_DB"_” and other times the database name has a concatenation of the “DB”.  Further, it’s interesting in seeing how they delineate words, in some instances using spaces, others underscores and others just capitalization of letters to delineate the database.

Interesting that it wasn’t polished to be uniform eh?