Please Compress Your Indexes and Shrink Your Databases If You Use Azure SQL Managed Instance

Shrinking databases in SQL Server isn’t fun – it’s slow, it causes blocking if you forget to use the WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY option, and sometimes it persistently fails and refuses to budge until you restart the instance. You only want to shrink a SQL Server database when you’ve got a good reason and a lot of patience.

If you’re using Azure SQL Managed Instance and you haven’t already used data compression on your indexes and shrunk your databases, you probably have two good reasons to do both of those things: performance and cost reduction.

Continue reading

Error 1119 When Shrinking Database: Removing IAM Page Failed

At times when shrinking a data file in a SQL Server or Azure SQL Managed Instance/Database, shrink operations may persistently fail with the error:

Msg 1119, Level 16, State 1, Line 11
Removing IAM page ([filenumber]:[pagenumber]]) failed because someone else is using 
the object that this IAM page belongs to. DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed 
error messages, contact your system administrator.

There’s not much documented on this error anywhere that I can find, so I’m sharing my experience with this error.

TLDR; I was not able to get past this without restarting the SQL Server service.

Continue reading