My Love with SQL Server

TempDB shows available free space in negative March 28, 2013

I was browsing through one of my favorite forums to replenish my knowledge on SQL Server based on others experiences. While I was doing that, I found this interesting question which made me think “how could that be possible?”.

I am not writing this post as a solution but wanted to share the forum post, and discussions that are happening by other experienced DBAs. Well if that is not enough a Gent has mentioned couple of links in the forum, on why this behavior could be there first in place. As expected, this was a bug in SQL Server 2008 SP1 and fixed in SQL Server 2012, but I am not sure if folks are having issues with SQL Server 2008 R2 though.

Here are those links that you might want to refer in case you have issues. One link explains the probable reason of the behavior, and the other one is a connect item.

– http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ialonso/archive/2012/10/08/inaccurate-values-for-currently-allocated-space-and-available-free-space-in-the-shrink-file-dialog-for-tempdb-only.aspx
– http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/518309/tempdb-log-file-showing-free-available-space-in-negative

I couldn’t and didn’t replicate the issue if at all I had to, because there is documented information on this. BTW, I haven’t seen any response on this question post by the person who had asked. So I am presuming this is the reason and probably could be fixed or is fixed.

Cheers and Thanks.