What could be the impacts to change the default values for Autogrowth for the files of a database?
Actually I have a database with the Autogrowth values switched between the Data and Log files.
I have those values in those database properties:
- DB_Data (Rows Data), PRIMARY, 71027 (Initial Size(MB)), “By 10 percent, unrestricted growth”
- DB_Log (Log), Not Applicable, 5011, “By 1MB, restricted growth to 2097152 MB”.
For the data file it depends whether or not you have instant file initialisation enabled for the SQL Server account. If you don’t you should definitely consider using a fixed growth increment as the length of time that the file growth takes will grow exponentially in proportion to the size of the growth. If you grow the file in too small an increment then you can end up with file system fragmentation.
For the log file you should definitely consider a much larger number than 1MB as you will end up with VLF fragmentation. Log file growth cannot take advantage of instant file initialisation so should always use a fixed increment (say between 1GB – 4GB unless you know for a fact that the log will always remain small) .
Of course in an ideal world it wouldn’t actually matter what you set these too as you should be pre-sizing files in advance at low traffic times rather than leaving when it happens to chance.