Dear Microsoft: Remove the 5000 Item Limit for SharePoint List Views

It’s 2016. In 1993, I used Microsoft Access to process over 1,000,000 records of data to implement a product profitability model at Staples – on an IBM 486 machine.

SharePoint-List-View-ThresholdWe’ve been saddled with a 5000 item limit for views since SharePoint 2010 launched. Oddly, in SharePoint 2007, there was no such limit. When 2010 came out, with its requirements for heavier and beefier hardware, the limit showed up.

I’ve read (well, skimmed) the white papers about why this needs to be. I’ve had long conversations with people in the SharePoint Product Group about the technical debt involved and why it is a “hard” thing to fix. I’ve read the highly visited KB articles about it, like “The number of items in this list exceeds the list view threshold, which is 5000 items” error when you view a SharePoint Online list in Office 365 Enterprise.

Bill Baer (@williambaer) has posted some promising messaging about the thresholds (See: Navigating List View Thresholds in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview), but I still don’t see any outward evidence that the limit is going away anytime in the foreseeable future.

I think there have been mixed messages and misinterpreted messages (no blame to Bill). The auto indexing idea which was recently added to Office 365 and comes in SharePoint 2016 (I believe – but I’m not positive) was misconstrued as lifting the 5000 item limit, which it definitely doesn’t.

The 5000 item limit in the UI for lists and libraries is arguably a good thing. There is absolutely NO reason to show more than 5000 items on a view page. Ever. No one can digest that amount of data or make use of it. Views should show just enough information for people to make good decisions about what to do next. (This is a very common mistake in SharePoint information architecture.) There are times when we simply need to have a view which derives from 5000+ items, though. Remember what year it is; 5000 items is a speck, a mote, an iota of data in this Big Data era.

No 5000 item limit

When it comes to calling SharePoint’s APIs, the 5000 item limit simply has to go. It’s a crazy limit in this day and age. I don’t care about all the technical debt talk about it. The SharePoint Product Group should be able to slide a solution underneath, at least on Office 365 – but ideally in on premises versions of SharePoint as well.

That’s the whole point of APIs: you can fix stuff under the hood without breaking any “contracts”. As more and more processing moves off-SharePoint, the 5000 limit is stifling. It’s been a problem for me for years because I live on the client side. I don’t always need all 5000+ items, but I need to know stuff about them: how many items match some criteria, what the sales total is for 12,834 items, how many items fall into a set of groupings, etc.

Whatever approach the Product Group takes shouldn’t matter, as long as they uphold the API contracts. For years they have told us – very rightly – that touching the underlying SQL tables puts us in an unsupported state. As long as we’re calling the APIs, what happens under the covers doesn’t matter. In fact, most of us should care less; that’s Microsoft’s domain and we should leave it to them.

With the new SharePoint Framework (SPX?) coming along – which I think is a TREMENDOUSLY good thing – the 5000 item limit is going to be on the minds of every developer who works with SharePoint. There will be no more server side tricks to haul out to cheat your way around this stuff. Those tricks have been reduced in degrees anyway. If SharePoint is to truly be treated as a service (as I firmly believe it should) then it needs to behave like a service in 2016+, not a service in the 1990s – or earlier.

I’ve heard many people – my fellow MVPs included – say that Microsoft will never fix this. There’s no cool Marketing moment in it, no splash they can make at a conference, little to show in the UI for it. But think of the consequences if they DON’T fix it. How long can we continue to believe that we can pump millions of items into a list (which is the true capacity) only to be told that we can only retrieve fewer than 5000 of them from the client side?

Unfortunately, if we assume they won’t fix it or can’t do it right, then the SPX may be doomed, IMO. I’d prefer to believe that they know it has to be fixed and are working on it. As my friend Jeff Shuey (@shuey) is always saying “I want to believe!”


If you want Microsoft to hear your vote on this idea, check out any or all of the feedback below ion the SharePoint UserVoice site:

  1. Remove 5000 item limit
  2. Provide a list limit over 5000
  3. Remove the list view threshold (5000 by default)
  4. Default notification for lists and library’s hitting the 5000 items limit
  5. Remove the limit of 5000 items as result in a view
  6. Allow new library look for libraries over 5000 items (provided the structure in managed correctly)<

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15 Comments

  1. Thanks Marc.I hope MS does it within next 10 years(will benefit my projects tremendously) because after 10 years anyway its not needed. ProgramBots/AI will take over all SharePoint style config/basic coding stuff. ProgramBots/AI will fix this if not fixed by MS by going into database and changing whatever SQL structure that is doing this 5k magic. Google AI already started reading thousands of books for further writings..similar case for architecture(after 10 years)

  2. Hi Mark,

    I’m facing that same problem you describe.
    It’s not about showing the 5000 records, but businesses need to manipulate these and much more data at the same time.
    How much were sales in year period of time, so you have to add thousands of records, etc.
    You cannot split aggregated data into views. Plus calculated columns cannot be indexed so your hands are tied up.

    I agree 100% that cloud solutions should have no restrictions…

    Any way, as a workaround I’m using PowerBI which out of the box has a matrix table.
    And then I embed it into a script webpart on the page.
    The free version has some restrictions though.

    Best,
    Laura

  3. You can actually override the limit in Sharepoint on-premise. Bad idea though. The reason it is in place is because of the way that the back-end SQL database works. Once you query more than 5000 items the SQL site collection db changes from locking at a row level to locking at a database level. Once database locking starts happening other database requests get delayed, and other users get long delays (really bad performance) on the site collection. So you can go ahead and remove the restriction, and watch your site performance go straight to hell (at random times).

  4. That this is still an issue is just sad. Microsoft continues to build features and products around custom list integration. I’ve presented demos of what you can now do with Power Apps and Flow , but you have to tell them the custom list data source is limited to 5000 items they are no longer interested in using SharePoint Online. The whole custom list underpinnings needs to be completely overhauled. Perhaps it should be based on Azure Cosmos or something.

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