• Several things from my experiences:

    We had a database that measured 100G+, and that grew between 1-3G a week. I eventuall configured it to autogrow 10G at a time, which made it a bit easier to watch the volume fill up.

    We bought database backup compression software (SQL LiteSpeed, of course). With that, it suddenly became possible to backup up that 100G turkey and store a backup or two on disk.

    I built a utility that once a day tallys the size of the data and log files, as well as the amount of space used by data, indexes, and blobs within a database. It does this for every database on the server and logs it in a table. After a month we had a notion what was going on; after a quarter we could establish solid growth trends and patterns.

    Most important lesson learned from Mr. Turkey: archive your data! Once data stored in a databases is no longer relevant, get it out of there [purge, or archive and then purge]. Do this or your databases may grow like the blob and conquer the world. (If When management will say "we can't delete that, we need it", tell them how much it will cost in hard drives x Raid x [Disk Arrays or SANs to house it all]. Sadly, they won't listen, and there really is no joy in saying "I told you so".

       Philip