Late night blog post to round out spring-break vacation... A number of customers I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks have been making use of database or file shrink in situations where they don’t really need to. There are few recurring scenarios I’ve seen: Deleting a lot of data and then...

For part two of my short series on data file shrinking, I want to look at how elements of your schemas can cause shrink to take much longer to run. In SQL Server 2005, three things in your schema will drastically affect the run-time of data file shrink. LOB data By LOB data, I mean any large...

This week's topic is data file shrinking. I've seen lots of mis-information in the last few weeks and I've had a bunch of questions about it. First up is auto-shrink. In my opinion, this feature causes way more problems than it solves (in fact, I can't think of a single problem it solves) and should...