Not sure if I can contribute anything meaningful to this discussion, but
here goes:
1) The 2007 and 2010 recommendations are a bit different. That's because
in 2007, admins would often end up restoring the entire farm, building PWA
as a new site collection, and then restoring the sites. Hence, in 2007,
I would generally recommend all of the sites in one site collection and PWA
in its own site collection (generally in different content DBs, but STSADM
allowed you to move site collections around so it wasn't a big deal).
2) In 2010, since PWA is now portable, it's not really a big deal to split
up PWA and the sites. It adds complexity which may/may not be required.
3) The other scenario in 2007 was when each project site looked like it would
hit 100GB or bigger. Then, a lot of folks would recommend splitting each
site into its own site collection and then into its own database. The reason
for that was simply the time it took to run a SQL backup, and that anything
bigger than 100GB couldn't get backed up or restored in a reasonable amount
of time (say an evening or so).
4) That too has changed a bit with SharePoint 2010, which has made great
progress in facilitating the backup process. So now, even the 100GB rule
of thumb doesn't really apply - well sort of. There're a couple of blog
Chances are that your SQL admins will have their own policy as to a maximum
content db size.
Does that help any?
Andrew Lavinsky [MVP] Blog: http://azlav.umtblog.com Twitter: @alavinsky
