SharePoint 2010 can support up to 30,000,000 items in a list with standard views, site hierarchies and metadata navigation. I’ve never seen a list come close to that, but I did set out to create such a list; mainly to see if it could be done. I didn’t go for 30 million items, I figured 1,000,000 was a good start…

Note: I did this on my VM, not in a client’s environment. 🙂

How did I have the time to create such a large list, you ask? Well, I didn’t. I used PowerShell to automate the whole thing.

PowerShell has become my new favorite tool, and it’s capabilities are truly endless.

The function I created uses standard PowerShell Cmdlets with some parameters to define your list. Here is an example of my script with the necessary parameters. This example would create 50,000 items in a list called MyBigList. Each list item would have a random choice (Red, blue or green) entered into the Category column defined in the list.

.\AddMultipleListItems.ps1 -ListName “MyBigList” -Amount 50000 -Choices “Red;Blue;Green” -ListItem “Added by PowerShell” -WebUrl http://intranet

I don’t know how many people will want to do this, but I can easily see adapting this script for other uses besides demo-ing large list functionality in SP2010.

Here’s the script:

#########################################################
## This script creates list items in a SharePoint list ##
#########################################################
####### Author: Ryan Dennis #############################
####### Twitter: @SharePointRyan ########################
####### Blog: www.iccblogs.com/blogs/rdennis ############
#########################################################

############# Variable Definitions ######################

## Number of list items to create ##
$amount = "1000"
## Start SP Assignment ##
$StartSpAssignment = Start-SPAssignment -Global
## Stop SP Assignment ##
$StopSpAssignment = Stop-SPAssignment -Global
## Define the categories ##
$choices = "Cat1;Cat2;Cat3;Cat4" -split ";"
## The List Name ##
$listName = "MyBigList"
## The Web Url ##
$webUrl = "http://towncenter/sites/rdennis"
## List Item Title ##
$listItem = "Added by PowerShell"

################## The Script ###########################
$StartSpAssignment
$mylist = (Get-SPWeb -identity $webUrl -AssignmentCollection $StartSpAssignment).Lists[$listName]
Write-Host "Creating $amount list items in $listName" -ForegroundColor Green
$i = 1
do 
{
    $newItem = $mylist.Items.Add()
    $newItem["Title"] = $listItem
    $newItem["Category"] = $choices | Get-Random
    $newItem.Update()
    $i++
}
while ($i -le $amount)

Write-Host "Finished!" -ForegroundColor Green
$StopSpAssignment