Hugo (et al.), I was running some scripts (in 2K5) based on this question to learn a little more and I noticed that the delete doesn't seem to return any space at all, even before reloading all the data back in?!? I filled your table with 1,000,000 records, copied the rows to a new table, then did a delete with no where (scary all by itself) and sp_spaceused showed the same amount of reserved space as before I ran the delete. Is it really holding on to all those pages still? I looked in the BOL under Dropping and Rebuilding Large Objects and it seems to indicate that the cleanup doesn't happen until after the transaction commits, but the result is the same whether or not I wrap it in a transaction. It's the oddest thing - sp_spaceused shows 0 rows taking up 47MB. :ermm: I understand now why the same space is used after reloading the data, but what about when there is no data at all? I never expected that.

Thanks,

Chad