Hi All,
We have recently encountered an issue within the last month or so where the tempdb system database has been growing exponentially on the server with our production impresario database on it. This has been causing problems when it gets up to 80 or more GBs.
First off, there is only about 10 MB of data in the db currently. I looked through the knowledge base and found info on where to put the database when you first set everything up, but that is not the problem. I feel like something is not quite setup the way it should be and I cannot restart the server during the middle of the day to get it to shrink.
Any help or expertise would be welcomed.
You can shrink a datafile without restarting your database server (which would actually result in tempdb being destroyed and recreated from model). While the server is online, tempdb behaves more or less like any other database. This doc and a google search for 'shrinkfile tempdb' will get you to some resources, although they are mostly geared towards development databases. Note that there used to be risks of corrupting tempdb when shrinking files, but these should be considered fixed. (Shrinking files can still cause blocking and deadlocks, however.)
You didn't mention if it was your tempdb data file or log file that is taking up the bulk of the space -- probably shrinking the logfile should be easier and less impactful than shrinking the datafile.