The 5000-item view threshold in SharePoint lists and libraries has been a bane for many people for a long time. I’ve been very vocal about it for the community (as well as for my own selfish reasons – I have client work to do!). I have a plethora of posts tagged with 5000 item limit, most of which are aimed to help us work around it, though I admit there is a fair amount of just plain complaining, too.
SharePoint Online is finally coming into the modern age, with Microsoft firmly attacking the 5000 item limit in several new ways. In the Microsoft Ignite session Harness collective knowledge with SharePoint and OneDrive content services (ECM), Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000) and Ian Story (@storyid) talked through how predictive indexing will improve our overall SharePoint experience.
We’ve all seen the rhetoric here: for years lists and libraries have been able to contain up to 30 million items, yet in too many cases we see errors when we have 5000 or more items in a view. In the “modern” experience, that may mean a #sadicecreamcone.
Or a #sadflattire.
By using predictive indexing – basically adding indices as the platform sees you will need them in addition to any you add manually – the real limits of list views become much larger.
Predictive indexing rolled out in advance of Ignite, so you may already have noticed some improvements when you work with lists with over 5000 items – as long as you are in the “modern” experience. As you add grouping to views or slice and dice list content using the column headers, SharePoint may be adding indices behind the scenes for you. You can see this happening if you look at the list settings and go to Indexed columns. There, you may see that some indices have been added by the platform, not by you.
One of the side benefits of predictive indexing – which to many will feel like a main benefit – is the the Filters Pane is now “smarter”, too. As those indices are added, the platform realizes that those columns may be things you’d like to see in the Filters Pane.
So are we all set now? Well, predictive indexing isn’t a total panacea, but should reduce the number of throttling events in many real-world situations. We still have to consider the 5000 item limit in several places, unfortunately. And taking proactive steps with our own indices is never a bad idea.
First, predictive indexing doesn’t change the threshold for REST calls. If we want to get more than 5000 items from a list or library via REST, we still need to page through them or some up with some other fancy caching scheme. I’d love to be able to tell a better story then “the 5000 item limit is still in effect for REST calls”. It’s still the case that – as has been the case for a long time now – if we use indexed columns as our first filters, we can get past the first 5000 items. The first filter still needs to bring the count under 5000 items for us to avoid an error, and we can’t retrieve more than 5000 items.
If you create a list or library and immediately dump more than 20,000 items into it, you’ll run into some of the same issues we used to have at 5000 items. We can create indices on lists with up to 20,000 items, but after that we run into the same issue we used to have with 5000 items: we can’t add a new index without getting below the 20,000 item number.
This also means Microsoft Flows or PowerApps may run into the 5000 item limit, depending on what you are doing (making REST calls yourself, for sure), as they use REST endpoints in the Microsoft Graph to retrieve data. The average power user building a Powerapp will see batches of 100 (but may never realize it). Someone taking things further (like reading from another list via a connector) might see batches of 500. In other words, if you are working with large lists, you need to understand the concept of paging on some level.
So what’s the upshot here? Well, primarily that Microsoft is working hard to make the constraints on large lists go away, or at least set the limitations to much higher levels. From an end user standpoint, this is Very Good News. From a developer standpoint, I think we should view it as a work in progress. Overall, though, it shows that Microsoft knows this is a weakness in the product and they are working hard to fix it.
I’m VERY happy to see this progress, and based on conversations with people like Chris and others in the Product Group I expect to see continuous improvement. Don’t worry – I’ll keep pushing them on it mercilessly, though!
by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog
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