When I hear the discussion about causes of data corruption in SQL Server, I always mention bugs in the operating system and the software itself. Fortunately, the last mentioned reason is an extremely rare case, but people are bound to make mistakes and SQL Server is also developed by humans. One such case occurred recently.

Monitoring of the size of database files is one of the important DBA tasks and this process should be automated. This article will show you how you can achieve this. Why is it important? Most likely you keep an eye of the size of the database and its files to make sure they don`t exceed the size of the hard drive. But do you track the amount of free space inside the databases files? For example you may have a 100GB database with one data file which is 95Gb and log file of 5Gb. But how much space is free in the file itself? Out of those 95Gb it may be that only 5Gb are filled with the data or may be already 94Gb are used. In the last case your database file may grow soon. To be able to predict such situation and prepare to it in advance let`s setup monitoring.