Monitoring Database disk space

Posted by Michael Freidgeim on Geeks with Blogs See other posts from Geeks with Blogs or by Michael Freidgeim
Published on Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:44:19 GMT Indexed on 2012/09/30 3:38 UTC
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An article Data files: To Autogrow Or Not To Autogrow? recommends NOT to rely on auto-grow, because it causing delays in unplanned times.

We should mtonitor database files(both data and log), and if they close to max capacity, manually increase the size.

However it doesn't give references, how to monitor the free space inside databases.

I've tried to look how to do it.

It can be done manually using

execute sp_spaceused for the database in question or

sp_SOS (can be downloaded from

Alternatively you can run SQL commands as suggested in Http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=82359 by Michael Valentine Jones

select

[FREE_SPACE_MB] = convert(decimal(12,2),round((a.size-fileproperty(a.name,'SpaceUsed'))/128.000,2))

from dbo.sysfiles a

More useful article Monitor database file sizes with SQL Server Jobs describes how to setup monitoring

Finally I found the excellent article

Managing Database Data Usage With Custom Space Alerts, that can be followed even support personnel without much DBA experience.