Primary File Group Full

Weird. I have an Agent job that populates some warehouse data every night. It's been working fine for over a year. Then it fails with a message that thePRIMARY file group is full. The database is set to Simple recovery, automatic, unrestricted growth by 10% for both the log file and the data file. The drive it's on has 96GB free. The data file is 1.5GB and the log is 2MB and there's not very much fluctuation in the amoutn of data going into it.

Anybody have an idea why that would happen?

Thanks for any insight,
Pete

You're probably timing out when it hits the autogrow. As ageneral rule, you should never rely on auto-growth! Instead, keepyour databases a lot bigger than you think you'll need. And setthe auto-grow rate to a very small amount (maybe 5-10 megs, some amountthat can grow within a few seconds). You have 96 GB free on thedrive -- why not set your databases to 10 or 20 GB?
And make sure you keep an eye on them. Keep growing them as they fill up.

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That's what I suspected since all the settings appear correct and the only activity in the job is just a huge number of inserts. I figured that at the point of needing to grow, there's a pile-up of inserts trying to happen. The problem with increasing the size significantly is that it's anything but the most important database on that server and I wouldn't want to limit the others just for this one. I can give it a little boost, though. Thanks for the help.

Pete

|||At the least, set a smaller auto-grow threshold so that it won't haveto wait -- it should take very little time to grow 5 or 10 megs. Note that this can contribute to fragmentation, which is why I suggestgrowing manually, in much larger chunks.