Balancing Size of Data Files in Filegroup

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Balancing Size of Data Files in Filegroup

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Topic

sureshot
Yak Posting Veteran

72 Posts

Posted - 2008-04-26 : 09:51:44

Due to SQL's proportional fill algorithm I'd like to have the amount of data in my data files as close to equal as possible.

File sizes before:
dat 482,895 MB 0% free
2dat 436,927 MB 3% free

I made the max size of each file 600,000 MB and added a third file 3dat also 600,000 MB. I rebuilt all the clustered indexes (and nonclustered for good measure) and unfortunately the re-balancing wasn't quite right.

File sizes after:
dat 464,761 MB 77% free
2dat 443,234 MB 73% free
3dat 309,568 MB 51% free

I only have a handful of heap tables that take up <100MB total so they're not the issue. I did do an ONLINE index rebuild. I'm not sure if an offline rebuild would have been better. I will not be able to try and offline for a few weeks though as it's time consuming and I have other tasks I need to run on this test server now.

I did a FULLSCAN rebuild on any column statistics not updated by the index rebuild but that didn't help either.

rmiao
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

7266 Posts

Posted - 2008-04-26 : 10:25:40

Keep in mind that all system objects are stay in primary file only.