Eirikur Eiriksson (10/16/2015)

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My suggestion is somewhat different to the previous ones

😎

1) Safety measures first, Backup the database with verify etc.

2) Create a new file group, add a new data file...

Jeff Moden (10/15/2015)

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As with a clustered index rebuild, the HEAP will be preserved...

Eric M Russell (10/15/2015)

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Here is my proposal.

First, Backup w/ verification and duplicate backups.

o Drop all foreign keys, indexes, including clustered, from OLD tables that will be altered. It will free...

Michael L John (10/15/2015)

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You have some fundamental misunderstandings.

Shrinking a database likely will cause fragmentation, but re-building the indexes does not automatically cause the database to grow.

If an...

Kristen-173977 (10/13/2015)

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dave 67553 (10/13/2015)

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Impressive results. Definitely will discuss with my IT guy. We cloud host at two sites and archive...

Several bits of great advice I will use so marked multiple answers. Thx folks!

Bill Talada (10/13/2015)

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You have two problems:

1. Lack of disk space.

2. Incorrect constraint on a column (wrong datatype).

With compression you can solve #1 and turn a blind eye to #2.

Likely your...

Kristen-173977 (10/13/2015)

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Interesting. If the column(s) are Nvarchar and do not contains, will never contain, extended characters wouldn't a one-time change of database structure to Varchar be better than long-term use...

As for backups, are you compressing your backups? If not, do so. It saves time and storage space and very few SQL Servers are so CPU constrained that they can't...

Kristen-173977 (10/13/2015)

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If you have several columns in the same table (as ALTER COLUMN doesn't support multiple columns in a single statement) and given that some NVARCHAR columns might be PKey...

John Mitchell-245523 (10/13/2015)

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Dave

Shrinking your database won't have any effect on the size of the backup, only the size of the database files.

1. Have you tried ALTER TABLE MyTable ALTER...

@SSCarpal Thx. I am going to experiment with compression to see what sort of time/space trade off the data has. Might also be helpful for the forthcoming AlwaysOn env where...

@GM thanks! That seems explicit enough to actually be clear.

@Lynn, agreed. I wanted to be some prepared though by having some opinions from folks that may researched this before. Thanks, Dave

This would be from MSDN not a Developer Edition per se, and would not be used for production during normal use, but only if failed over to, which Software Assurance...