From: Ellen K. 

There were only a few users left by that point, it was like 9:00 p.m.,
probably fewer than 20.   (During the day I have several hundred.)   It
did take several minutes (at least five) to add 3 GB.

I'm not sure whether it already creates pages when the size of the data
file is increased, but that would be logical, particularly for this type of
schema which includes BLOBs.   I do know that SQL Server stores the
BLOBs on their own pages, i.e. the BLOB belonging to a given row does not
go on the same page with the rest of the row.

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 08:47:34 +0200, "Antti Kurenniemi"
 wrote in message :

>I have no knowledge of SQL server at all, but 5% of 18Gb is about
>900Megabytes, so increasing the size by 900 Mb in 30 seconds does sound like
>it could be the problem - especially if there was a lot of other things
>going on (like other users pounding the same database / server)...
>
>I would think a database "file" is not just empty space reserved from a
>disk, but it has to have it's own "filesystem" inside, so
creating it would
>take a while. When you increased the size manually, did you take note how
>long it took? Were you the only one using the database at that point?
>
>
>Antti Kurenniemi
>
>"Ellen K"  wrote in message
>news:509e9e.8a0132{at}harborwebs.com...
>> Some of you may remember that I made a recordings database here to hold
>calls
>> made to our customers.  (I made the back end.)  When I made it I set the
>size
>> of the primary datafile to 18GB.  It's been running flawlessly for over 10
>> months.   This evening the users started having a problem trying to save
>the
>> recordings to the database.  The failure occurred on the .Execute
>statement of
>> the Command that calls the stored procedure.  I noticed that the data had
>> reached the size allocated for the file.  The file was set to auto-grow
>(5%).
>> However, since I couldn't find anything else wrong, and since the test
>version
>> of the database (which only has 15GB of data in an 18GB-dimensioned file)
>did
>> not exhibit the same behavior, I decided to try increasing the size of the
>file
>> with an ALTER DATABASE statement.  I increased it to 21GB.  Lo and behold,
>the
>> problem disappeared.
>>
>> So now the question is, why wasn't the auto-grow setting honored?
>>
>> The users were getting an error message that the timeout expired... the
>default
>> timeout for the ADO Command object is 30 seconds... thinking out loud I'm
>> wondering whether maybe the problem could be that SQL Server TRIED to
>increase
>> the size, but couldn't add 5% of 18GB in 30 seconds, so the timeout
>> expired???????
>>
>

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