This article discusses various ways in which we can move a site collection to another content database
In this article, different ways to move a site collection to another content database are discussed along with advantages and disadvantages of each method. This site movement may be required for many reasons including reducing restore times, move less active Site Collections to Content DBs on slower discs, move Site Collections to Content DBs that reflect geographic regions etc
Using MergeContentDB stsadm command:
This is the most direct way of moving a site collection. The syntax is given below. One disadvantage is depending on the size of the db or sql server load this command might cause corruption of source and destination db. Hence this method should be used only when the size of site collection is less than 10GB.
Syntax
stsadm -o mergecontentdbs
-url <URL name>
-sourcedatabasename <source database name>
-destinationdatabasename <destination database name>
- [-operation] {1-3}
1 - Analyze (default)
2 - Full database merge
3 - Read from file
[-filename] <file generated from stsadm -o enumsites>
BackUp and Restore Method
Another way of moving the site collection is to take a backup of the sitecollection, delete the sitecollection and then restore the site collection so that it comes up in the required database.
Using the Batch Site Manager
The Batch Site Manager tool is included in the SharePoint Administration Toolkit. We can use the batch site manager tool for site collection which are less than 15GB in size.