Reclaim space after dropping a table

Question

I have a table in my DB that is 30GB in size.

The disk space is not change once I drop the table , how can I do.

Please help advice.

Answer 1

SQL Server never shrinks a database file on it's own, because it's an expensive I/O operation.
You can shrink the database (file) manually with

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (Transact-SQL)
DBCC SHRINKFILE (Transact-SQL)

Note: Shrinking will cause index fragmentation and that effects query performance.

Answer 2

Hi @Lily June ,

The drop table table will release the data space to the data file. That is, make part of the occupied data space free
That requires shrinking the database or file.
In order to reduce the shrink time, you can try DBCC SHRINKFILE first.
After shrinking, you can rebuild the index for the fragmentation problem.

Best regards,
Seeya

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Answer 3

Just to be clear.

When you delete data from the database, the space used by that data is flagged as "free" inside the database file and is available for use by new data rows. The physical file never gets reduced unless you manually shrink the file/database.