SQL Server Database Size - Real World Data

As you know from a previous post, we are supporting thousands and thousands of production SQL Server databases for many customers across all industries and markets. This gives us interesting insights into how SQL Server is being used. Our scale also allows us to undertake broad analysis which, we believe, can be extrapolated to give a reasonable picture of what the SQL Server world looks like across the board.

Recently we covered in this post, the relative usage of different versions of SQL Server. Now, in this post we are covering the relative sizes of SQL Server databases.

The graph bellow shows the relative database sizes of SQL Server databases in production today across our client base:

So what can we learn from this?

• Well obviously there are lots and lots of small (<1GB) databases. This is to be expected as SQL Server is now the defacto back-end data store for almost any application deployed on a Microsoft platform.
• But probably more surprising for some is that almost half (44%) of all SQL Server databases are actually not that small, over 1GB in size. In fact 26% of all SQL Server databases are over 10GB in size.
• Databases 10GB-1TB are common, with 1TB-5TB being much less so and >5TB databases are still pretty rare.

Of course the usual disclaimers about statistics and the margin of error etc when we extrapolate this out. But interesting none the less.