Find large files through Search in SharePoint 2010

How to get a list of large files in a (very large) SharePoint 2010 Farm, sorted by file size?

I discussed about this requirement with my friend and teammate Riccardo Celesti and we ended up with the same answer: use search!

Unfortunately, since the customer’s environment is still running on top of SharePoint Server 2010, the solution was not that immediate: we would need to add a metadata property mapped to the file size (and schedule a full crawl afterwards, which may be not feasible).

Or… it’ SharePoint 2010, right? We still have the FullText SQL Query Language available.

Typically, the SQL Query Language should not be an option, since this feature has been removed in SharePoint 2013 and was already considered obsolete in SharePoint 2010 (take a look at the “tip” at the beginning the MSDN page).

Anyway, this was a “fire and forget” requirement, so here’s what we ended up with:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$site = Get-SPSite http://the-url-of-a-site
$query = new-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query.FullTextSqlQuery($site);
$query.ResultTypes = "RelevantResults"
$query.RowLimit = 1000
$query.EnableStemming = $false
$query.TrimDuplicates = $false
$query.QueryText = "SELECT URL, filename, size, path FROM SCOPE() WHERE IsDocument=1 ORDER BY size DESC"
$results = $query.Execute()
$table = New-Object System.Data.DataTable
$table.Load($results["RelevantResults"], "OverwriteChanges")
$table | ogv

Hope useful