Support for changes to the databases that are used by Office server products and by Windows SharePoint Services

The Microsoft Office server products that are listed in the "Applies to" section store data in Microsoft SQL Server databases. These products use various stored procedures for regular processing. Therefore, the Microsoft SQL Server databases are important to the successful operation of these products.

The products that are listed in the "Applies to" section were tested by using the existing structure and were approved for release based on that structure. Microsoft cannot reliably predict the effect to the typical operation of these products when parties other than Microsoft support agents change the database or run stored procedures. Parties other than would include, but not be limited to, changes that are made by customers, by third-party vendors, or by consultants.

Examples of such database changes include, but are not limited to, the following: Reading from the database, manually or programmatically Adding database triggers:

• Adding database triggers
• Adding new indexes or changing existing indexes within tables
• Adding, changing, or deleting any primary or foreign key relationships
• Changing or deleting existing stored procedures
• Calling existing stored procedures directly
• Adding new stored procedures
• Adding, changing, or deleting any data in any table of any of the databases for the products that are listed in the "Applies to" section
• Adding, changing, or deleting any columns in any table of any of the databases for the products that are listed in the "Applies to" section
• Making any modification to the database schema
• Adding tables to any of the databases for the products that are listed in the "Applies to" section
• Changing the database collation

If an unsupported database modification is discovered during a support call, the customer must perform one of the following procedures at a minimum:

• Perform a database restoration from the last known good backup that did not include the database modifications
• Roll back all the database modifications

If a good backup that does not include the database modifications does not exist, or if the customer is unable to roll back the database modifications, the customer must recover the data manually. The customer must do this before the customer opens a disaster recovery case to obtain help to migrate any recovered data to a new, unmodified database to return to a supportable database environment.

If it is determined that a database change is necessary, a support case should be opened to determine whether a product defect exists and should be addressed. In rare circumstances and during a support incident, support may provide customers with a script that makes modifications to the databases that are used by the products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. In these cases, all modifications are reviewed by the development team to make sure that the operations being performed will not result in an unstable or unsupported database state.

Database changes that are made with the guidance of support during a support incident will not result in an unsupported database state. However, these support-guided actions do not negate the previous statements about customer modifications to these databases.

Additionally, customers must not make support-guided changes outside a support incident or provide such changes to other customers for use. In addition to the items previously mentioned, performing any read operations directly against these databases is unsupported. Reading from these databases programmatically or manually could cause unexpected locking within Microsoft SQL Server that can result in overall performance problems.

In the event that unsupported read operations are discovered as part of a support call, the database will be considered to be in an unsupported state. To return the database to a supported state, the customer must cease all unsupported read activities, regardless of whether they are being performed manually or programmatically, and may need to a database restoration from the last known good backup that did not include unsupported read activities.

For more information about support for changes to the databases that are used by Microsoft Office server products and by Windows SharePoint Services, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: