• I was expecting the fragmentation to grow on the basis that pages at the end of a database file get moved to empty pages earlier during a shrink.

    When i tried this out with a new database (512mb data file and 128mb log file) I got a different fragmentation of 46.875% (2008) 70.3125% (2005) before the table drop and the same after the shrink. I have tried it several times on SQL 2005 (9.00.5057) and SQl 2008 (10.50.2500) and get roughly the same fragmentation percentage. During the shrink i got the warning mesage below.

    DBCC SHRINKDATABASE: File ID 1 of database ID 34 was skipped because the file does not have enough free space to reclaim.

    I tried running the script with 2500 inserts into FirstTable and got exactly the same frgmentation as the question 39.0625% but still got the same warning when trying to shrink the file.

    So the correct answer for me was no change. I guess the real answer is "it depends" on your setup.