Press "Enter" to skip to content

File Growth Rate Under 1MB

John Morehouse shows that the file growth rate GUI for Management Studio doesn’t report values under 1MB correctly:

While I was recently,  doing a review of a client’s environment I discovered that the GUI can lie to you when it comes to the database file growth rates.  By default, the data file is set to a 1MB growth rate and the log file is configured for a 10% growth rate.  Both are horrible settings for most OLTP environments.  However, starting with SQL Server 2016, the default growth rates are configured for 64MB, which in my opinion is better than the previous defaults.

Using the GUI to look at a 2017 Scratch database I have, we can see that the data file is configured for 1MB and the log file is set for 64MB growth.

I don’t think there’s a good reason for a file growth rate under 1 MB at this point.  That could have made sense in the late ’90s, but the idea of growing 128KB at a time is funny.