what are the .DAT files?

[waely]

hi,
I have a bunch of .DAT and .dat files in my sqldata folder. what are these files? i know they are not the actual data because my database changes daily and the last modified date on these files was last month.

any idea what those files are or where are the actual database data?
I'm using win NT with SQL 6.5.

thanks

 

[RobertT687]

Those ARE your actual data files. The last modified date probably is the last time you cycled the SQL server. My company has a legacy SQL6.5 system which is used every day. The last modified date on our .DAT files is 8/2/04 which is when the server was cycled for maintenance. Keep in mind that version 6.5 used database 'devices' which are essentially big chunks of disk space with lots of free space for databases to grow. Since manipulation of the internal contents of these chunks is managed by the DBMS and not the OS, as far as the OS is concerned, the file hasn't changed.

 

[waely]

thanks for the info. I'm tryig to clean up my machine since we're running very low on space. I found a folder called sql_dump that has big files too. any idea?

thanks

 

[JayKusch]

those are either backup files or they are files that contain information when your SQL Server crashed or had issues. It my contain "bug" dump info. They are safe to delete.

Thanks

J. Kusch