Shrinking the CommServe Databases.

The DR Backup option to shrink the database before DR backup will shrink the whitespace in the CommServe database datafiles on the disk. It has no affect on the size of the DR Backup since the whitespace is not included in any DR backup.

The commserve databases are, by default, enabled for autoshrink. However, in its default recovery mode (simple), autoshrink only applies to the transaction log. The database will grow as necessary, but never shrink. Manually shrinking the database may be desired after a major data aging operation, or if disk space becomes an issue. If it’s the later, you may want to seriously consider relocating the database or expanding the current location’s available disk space.

Note that shrinking the database could have a negative effect. According to experienced DBA’s:

1. Each page moved will be logged to the transaction log. Move a lot of pages and your log file will grow accordingly.
2. Moving datapages around will fragment your database.
3. Heavy shrinking and growing of database files will fragment your file system, which will hurt performance even more.
4. After the shrink, as users add rows etc in the database, the file has to grow again. Growing a database file is an expensive operation, it hurts performance. During the grow operation, some modifications will be blocked until the grow operation has finished.