Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Database data file size limitation - SSMS

I had to configure a data file in a very large database this one time and I used Management Studio for that. The file size I was aiming at was 3TB (a very large database indeed). I was quite surprised to see that SSMS has a limit to the size you can configure, which was 2,097,152 MB (i.e. roughly 2TB). I thought I was missing something here and quickly turned to SQL Server Maximum Capacity Specifications to see how big a data file can get, and to found out it is 16TB, not 2TB (the transaction log is restricted to 2TB, but I was trying to configure the data file). Modifying the data file using the ALTER DATABASE statement resulted in the expected behaviour and I was finally able to expand the file as I wished. However, the SSMS behaviour is unreasonable, and maybe it is because of the limitations once posed by the MBR partition tables which did not enable to you to configure drives larger than 2TB. However, this is something that can be resolved by using GPT instead and no longer is a limitation as such.

So, I’ve opened a bug in Microsoft Connect (ID 554026). Be sure to vote for it!

Read more: Yaniv Mor

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