Skip to main content

Handling an over sized db to save space(SQL Server)

Sometimes having too many unwanted backup and temporary tables will increase the space by huge volumes so it is a best practice to often clean them and keep it tidy. This will improve the performance as well as reduce memory issues.

The below stack question contains a query which can be used to identify the space consuming tables in SQL Server. I have attached the question and the query to be executed.


SELECT 
    t.name AS TableName,
    i.name as indexName,
    sum(p.rows) as RowCounts,
    sum(a.total_pages) as TotalPages, 
    sum(a.used_pages) as UsedPages, 
    sum(a.data_pages) as DataPages,
    (sum(a.total_pages) * 8) / 1024 as TotalSpaceMB, 
    (sum(a.used_pages) * 8) / 1024 as UsedSpaceMB, 
    (sum(a.data_pages) * 8) / 1024 as DataSpaceMB
FROM 
    sys.tables t
INNER JOIN      
    sys.indexes i ON t.object_id = i.object_id
INNER JOIN 
    sys.partitions p ON i.object_id = p.object_id AND i.index_id = p.index_id
INNER JOIN 
    sys.allocation_units a ON p.partition_id = a.container_id
WHERE 
    t.name NOT LIKE 'dt%' AND
    i.object_id > 255 AND  
    i.index_id <= 1
GROUP BY 
    t.name, i.object_id, i.index_id, i.name 
ORDER BY 
    object_name(i.object_id)



Execute the above query and identify the space consuming unwanted tables and drop them. even you drop them the consumed space will not be released to the windows and to do that we need to use shrink db task from UI.


Then select that option and click OK to shrink the db and release the space to windows.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Choosing color scheme for Power BI reports

Choosing beautiful colors for an attention seeking Power BI report is always challenging. Sometimes we may have an important message but it might go unseen if proper color scheme is not used, so it is important to create reports which are informational and visually appealing. In this blog our main objective is to get an idea about selecting appropriate color scheme and tools that can be beneficial to do this. What is a color scheme? As you all know not all colors look great together and you can tell stories by just having only two colors, have a look at the following image, there in the middle you can see a circle with same color and same dimension, only thing that changes is the back ground, but depending on the back ground the way you see those circles are totally different. Some small circles appear softer, some appear sharper, and some are brighter also you might notice movements or depth effect too. It is important to choose colors wisely to serve the purp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ragged hierarchy in Power BI

Case- I have a data set which has to be visualized in a ragged hierarchy. What is ragged hierarchy A ragged hierarchy is a user defined hierarchy with an uneven number of levels.   You can see the above table which has 5 levels of hierarchy. In the first level we only have “World” as a category then moving forward to the next level we have two categories  namely “UK” and “USA” likewise the level of hierarchy is drilling down up to five levels with an uneven amount of categories. Creating a hierarchy in Power BI In the above image  you can notice that I have right clicked the “level 1” column which has to be the first level of our hierarchy, Once it is right clicked there you will notice “New hierarchy” as the second option then you will have to click that in order to create a new one. As you can notice in the above image once I have created a new hierarchy then a new column is created named “Level 1 Hierarchy” in that I have d...
3 comments
Read more

Identifying unused space consuming tables in SQL Server

  You might have an SQL Server database with lot of unnecessary tables. But you are unable to remove them because you don't know if it is still being used or not. Sometimes they have been created as a backup and not deleted so now it's there as a redundant and taking up your space. In order to identify such tables the below query comes in handy. You can check the Last Interaction date and the table size to determine what to do. As a best practice it is better to ha ve a last updated date as a column in tables to identify the current relevant tables. S ELECT   last_user_scan LastInteraction,   t.NAME AS TableName,   s.Name AS SchemaName,   p.rows AS RowsCount,   SUM(a.total_pages) * 8 AS TotalSpaceKB,   CAST(ROUND(((SUM(a.total_pages) * 8) / 1024.00), 2) AS numeric(36, 2)) AS TotalSpaceMB,   SUM(a.used_pages) * 8 AS UsedSpaceKB,   CAST(ROUND(((SUM(a.used_pages) * 8) / 1024.00), 2) AS numeric(36, 2)) AS UsedSpaceMB,   (SUM(a.total_pages) -...
Post a Comment
Read more