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Do you have any scheduled jobs/tasks against that DB that are using maybe some staging tables to &quot;load&quot; data then delete it?<br />
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Or do you have some maintenance plan to Rebuild Indexes? as this is also growing MDF file(s).
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there are 4 jobs.. will check in them how they handle..<br />
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only inserts are a concern in this context, right? not deletes?
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INSERTs primarily indeed however a UPDATE in sql is done as an implicit INSERT/DELETE so I'm not sure yet whats happening on on large batch updates so I need to test it.<br />
Also rebuild indexes will definitely grow it.
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&gt;&gt;Also rebuild indexes will definitely grow it. <br />
yes, one job is rebuilding.<br />
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so It makes the data file to bloat and then brings it back to normal range, right?
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the data growth setting on the data file is 10%<br />
looking at sysfiles system view, there is plenty of unused space yet in the data file.<br />
current data file size 460 GB, used space 370GB, free 90GB.<br />
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we wanted to keep the data file size to 410GB since data growth is relatively slow on this database.<br />
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so i shrunk the file to 410GB which worked fine.<br />
but today, i see that the file has grown back to 460 GB.<br />
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so obviously it has grown more than 10%, and data usage is still @ 370 GB.<br />
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what could cause more than 10% growth?
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the data growth setting on the data file is 10%
looking at sysfiles system view, there is plenty of unused space yet in the data file.
current data file size 460 GB, used space 370GB, free 90GB.

we wanted to keep the data file size to 410GB since data growth is relatively slow on this database.

so i shrunk the file to 410GB which worked fine.
but today, i see that the file has grown back to 460 GB.

so obviously it has grown more than 10%, and data usage is still @ 370 GB.

what could cause more than 10% growth?

what can cause file growth in data file (other than autogrow % formula)  when there is less/no data activity?

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a suite of relational database management system (RDBMS) products providing multi-user database access functionality.Component services include integration (SSIS), reporting (SSRS), analysis (SSAS), data quality, master data, T-SQL and performance tuning. Major improvements include the  Always On technologies and support for unstructured data types.