SQL Server Express 10GB Limit

Paul Jones

New Member
At our company we are using a proprietary third party custom application that uses SQL Server Express as its backend. As you are aware SQL Server Express 2008 has a hard 10GB limit. For the “old” data in this database, we have a separate database offsite to which we store the data.

I am aware that purchasing SQL Server Enterprise would solve this issue, but being a small company, this is not a solution for us at this point in time. We do not need “old” records to be stored in the “live” SQL Express database that is being used by the proprietary software. So I can delete the “old” records from the SQL Express database, but the problem I am experiencing is how to reclaim the space consumed by the “old” data after deleting this data. I don’t want to increase fragmentation by using the DBCC SHRINKDATABASE command. But any command I run, to rebuild the index, or shrink the database or the log files, doesn’t reclaim this space. The 10GB database is currently showing less than 100MB of unused space according to sp_spaceused. I appreciate any of your input or help with this issue from one drop of SQL to another.
 

Peter Schmitz

Administrator
Staff member
Hi Paul,

Instead of switching to Enterprise Edition, you could always give Standard Edition a try. It's far less costly.
 
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