How SharePoint Content Is Organized

SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server store information in SQL Server, but the content is presented and managed in SharePoint-specific ways.

All SharePoint content resides in installations called farms with one or more servers, which in a large installation will include Web servers, SQL Server database servers, and servers running specialized SharePoint services, such as full-text search indexing. Each farm hosts one or more site collections. A site collection includes a top-level site and its subsites, all of whose content resides in tables in a single SQL Server content database. Site collection administrators control the content management policies for the entire site collection, but can delegate some rights (such as the right to create subsites and approve content) to administrators of individual sites in the collection.

Most SharePoint content in each site is stored in tables called lists, each row of which is called an item. For example, a SharePoint calendar is a list of event items. Conceptually, SharePoint lists correspond to tables in a relational database and items correspond to database records (although that is not how lists are stored in SQL Server). SharePoint typically keeps documents in a special type of list called a document library, each item of which corresponds to a document. SharePoint stores documents in SQL Server by default, although third parties can extend SharePoint to work with stored documents elsewhere, such as in a file system.