Today I ran a script to delete a huge portion of data in a DEV environment and I was excited to get back a few hundred GB, but I only got back a portion of the free space that the Properties window said I had. What was going on?
It turns out that when shrinking a database, the smallest a file will get is back to the “Initial Size” in the database properties/files window.
To shrink it more, simply lower the Initial Size and then shrink the database again. You can use the GUI or use:
DBCC ShrinkFile (N'FileName', 1000) GO
