Howdy folks! Long time no write.
In this post, I will be answering a couple of questions from the previous posts about dropping columns.
A quick refresh
If you haven’t read the previous posts on this topic, here is the list:
In my last article - Identify Tables With Dropped Columns
- we saw how we can identify tables that have columns that were dropped.
Today, we are going to check a way to approximately calculate how much space we can expect to recover if we rebuild our table.
If you want to read the 1st article I published on this subject, you can read it here - What happens when we drop a column on a SQL Server table? Where’s my space?
On my last article - What happens when we drop a column on a SQL Server table? Where’s my space?
- I have shown what happens when we drop a column from a table.
Today, we are going to check if we have a way to find tables with dropped columns.
Why?
As we learnt, when we drop a column this is just a metadata operation and won’t clear the space that was being used. You may be asking - Do I have more tables with dropped columns that I’m not aware of? - And that is a legit question.
Let’s see how we can achieve this.