SQL 2008 Forecasting Future Growth

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axlwe

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Wannabe Geek

Topic # 150930 8-Aug-2014 01:49

Hi All,

I am running SQL 2008 at a Customer's. They currently only have 5GB of spaced left and I would like to be able to forecast there database growth. I would like to give the customer the estimate on how long 5GB will last and when they will need to expand or add more HD space to there server.

Any easy way to tell?

Thanks,

Robert

charsleysa

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Reply # 1104546 8-Aug-2014 04:42

Use backup history to determine the rate of change, or monitor the hard drive size by taking daily readings for at least 7 consecutive days to determine the mean size difference which will be your rate of change.

Convert the rate of change interval to days then by dividing the rate of change by days between readings to get a rate of change with single day interval.

Divide 5GB by the rate of change and you'll have your answer in days.

Example:
Backups occur every 7 days and each time the size changes by 70MB, so your initial rate of change is 70MB per 7 days.
Convert rate of change interval to days so it would be 70MB divided by 7 which is a rate of change of 10MB per day.
Lastly divide 5GB by 10MB to get the estimated remaining days before the 5GB are used up, which would be 500 days.

Regards
Stefan Andres Charsley

freitasm

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Reply # 1105282 9-Aug-2014 10:17

You also have to consider Log storage...

Is this 5GB for both data and log?
What about tempdb usage?
What kind of transactions happen in this database? Small ones or large update/insert queries?
What's the current size of this database?
What happens if someone by mistake creates a query that generates endless log entries and your log eats all that space?

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Ragnor

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Reply # 1107186 12-Aug-2014 17:40

5GB is too little spare space in general, recommend expanding anyway.

Disk is cheap pretty these days... What make/model is the server? Is the storage local disk or something else SAN/iSCSI etc? Are data and logs on the same storage?