Looks like some process has the .ldf of the model database locked. I would run procexp.exe (from Microsoft) to determine what process is locking the file, then kill that...

No prob- I COMPLETELY understand how lack of sleep affects one's posts!

As for rebuilding the clustered indexes.... that's the strange thing. Before any of the shrink operations, I...

ignore this one... posted twice... not sleep related- just user error. 😉

hmm- I just want to make sure I understand you correctly (and vice versa). The file I'm trying to shrink is a datafile- not a log file... but the...

Thanks Steve! Can you provide any specifics when you say "mess up my logs and backups" ?

I get NOTHING (literally, the result is the word NOTHING). The db is in simple mode btw.

My thought is that a shrink... i.e. DBCC SHRINKFILE wont work... but please correct me if I'm wrong.

The data file shows only a few hundred MB "free".... so,...

Your reading the numbers right... the entire database is almost 2 TB- this single table is almost 800GB... It currently contains about 8 years worth of data. ...

Answering my own question in case someone else with similar issues comes along-

BOL is Fullofit... it does report progress, but not every 5 minutes... in my case, it took serveral...

To answer your questions, there is a FK relationship on recid and I'm deleting about 15%- 300 million records out of about 2 billion.

Unfortunately, the reason I have been asked to do this work is that the server was allowed to get to less than 3% available disk space... which means temp tables...

Nevermind.

might have answered my own question... thinking of telling the developers they need to create synonyms... but still would like to hear any other approaches or thoughts on using synonyms...

Can you point me in the direction of any resources (preferably from MS) that explain exactly how this works?

Wow... ok- maybe this will stir a response:

SQL express is listening on Port 1860... SQL Browser service IS running. I can connect to the DB from another server which...