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This happened a few months ago, but I thought I should make note of it on my blog.

The program I wrote during my 3 months on the Exchange Server team Microsoft is called Routing Log Viewer. It was just released as part of SP1 of Exchange 2007.  I was pleasantly surprised that the code I wrote (at least from what I can tell based on the documentation) didn’t need to be modified much after my whirlwind summer.
Here is a link to the documentation on the software:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/06/27/445517.aspx

One of my mail servers today crashed at 5:00 AM. It said the following:

Exchange store ‘First Storage Group\Mailbox Store (MERCURY)’: The logical size of this database (the logical size equals the physical size of the .edb file and the .stm file minus the logical free space in each) is 18 GB. This database size has exceeded the size limit of 18 GB.

This database will be dismounted immediately.

When the database was dismounted, all connections to Exchange from our employees running Outlook started failing. The solution was pretty easy though. All that was necessary was to add a DWORD entry to the registry.

1. Start regedit.exe and browse to the following: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\\Private-GUID note: Your GUID # will be unique to your installation
2. Add the following DWORD Key: Database Size Limit in GB Make sure it is exactly like the above since it is case sensitive. Then set the decimal value to something greater that 18 (default). You can set it up to 75 if you’re running Exchange 2003 SP2.

Also, beware of your available hard drive space and your backup strategy. Our backup strategy was only able to handle a database increase up to 25 GB, so that’s what I had to set it at until I can make provisions to handle a larger database.

Here is a Microsoft article on this problem