It's really great to have such an active (and knowledgeable!) community. We could use bulklogged recovery model and that would mitigate the growth issue, but the question was more theoretical....

Thanks Charles. I guess it makes some sense, but having a lot of unused pages sitting around for future use seems a bad use of space. We do a lot...

I'm still not clear why SQL Server doesn't auto shrink the transaction log when a full backup is done in the full recovery model. No transaction logs are needed once...