Engineering Team Shrinks 190 GB Production Database to 45 GB Before Cloud Migration
A software team reduced a production database from 190 GB to 45 GB in a single overnight maintenance window ahead of a cost-sensitive cloud migration. Initial measurements revealed that only 106.7 GB of the 190.6 GB allocated was actually in use, meaning 84 GB was simply unreclaimed empty space from past growth spikes. The team found that the largest storage offenders were not high-row-count tables but blob-heavy tables with relatively few rows, including one configuration table consuming 13 GB across just 21,000 rows. To prevent the transaction log from overwhelming available disk space during bulk deletions, the database was temporarily switched from full to simple recovery mode, keeping log size stable at 6.5 GB throughout the three-hour operation. The team documented six key lessons, emphasizing the importance of measuring allocated versus used space and ranking tables by size in megabytes rather than row count before planning any cleanup.
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