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Understanding Available Free Space on the Shrink Database Screen
On the shrink database screen there is a value for available free space. Yesterday it read 2%. I ran a shrink database and the value turned to 0%. What does available free space on this screen represent.
Essentially it represents how much space there is above and beyond data. Space that can presumably be removed during a shrink operation and returned to the file system.
Greg is completely right. But another way of looking at it that might be useful is: The free space represents how much more data can be added before the database will have to either autogrow or return errors for lack of space.
Make sure you know do some index maintenance to repair all the fragmentation you did with removing the 2% of free space. Greg and and Tim are 100% correct. It is the amount of free space in the file for additional data. You typically want this unless it is a read only database. You typically don't want the data file to auto grow unless you have instant file initialization on as this causes performance issue when the data file has to grow. Depending on the size of the database 2% isn't a great deal. My low water mark is 5% for most of my databases. It really all depends on growth patterns.
Thanks to everyone who responded. This was very helpful. I thought it might be something like that!
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