Wildly Expanding Database

[artoo]

We have a client whose database has started to expand rapidly over the last few days, i.e. growing by a couple of hundred MB in a few hours. I went down to the site this morning but could find nothing out of the ordinary. The client is using the database the same as it has always done, and there is no new software or changes to business processes that may be causing the problem.

Profiler didn't show up anything unusual. Client is running SQl Server 7.0.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[tlbroadbent]

Here are some questions that may help you resolve the issue.

Have you done record counts on tables? Do you find any that appear out of line with the norm? Are there any new tables?

Did anyone greatly enlarge the data type of one or more columns? Or change a data type from varchar to char so that all records have wasted space? Were any data types changed from char/varchar to nchar/nvarchar?

Were indexes added or modified? A clustered index on multiple columns or on a large column can greatly impact the size of a database as the clustered index is carried on all other indexes.

Has a trigger or SP been implemented lately that inserts rows? If so, is it working properly? Terry L. Broadbent - DBA
Computing Links:

http://tlbroadbent.home.attbi.com/prog.htm

faq183-874 contains "Suggestions for Getting Quick and Appropriate Answers" to your questions.

 

[JohnBates]

Terry offered some good suggestions.

Are they using any type of data Replication ?

I have seen the system merge-related tables get very large (several million of rows).. but it was over a period of weeks, even months.

I agree, it is likely they made a change to 1 or more tables recently.

Good luck with it. John