Recently, I was doing some testing/playing around on a particular database on my home test servers. After I was done, I checked out the “Data/Log Files Autogrowth/Autoshrink” portion of the “Disk Usage” report for the database, which is shown below.

While I might expect to see results like this on a test box, I would be mortified if I saw it on a production box. As a small challenge to your SQL Server administration skills, just by looking at the above data, what can you deduce it? What do you think is going on, and why, and how might it affect the databases’ performance? In addition, what might you do to prevent the problem in the first place? Let’s see who can come up with the best explanation. Please post your responses below.

PS: If you are not familiar with this report, I suggest you learn more about it. It is available from SSMS by right-clicking on a database, and then selecting Reports | Standard Reports | Disk Usage. Such a simple report can make it easy to identify some specific database configuration problems, as demonstrated in the example above.