We’re currently working with a customer on an Archiving project and as part of it trying to reduce their 8.5tb database down to where it should/needs to be (~5tb) in order to be able to restore it in their dev/test environments. Unfortunately adding more disk space in these environments is not an option so as we remove data we are forced to shrink the database files.

I’ll be posting some issues you may encounter when trying to shrink a very large database filled with a ton of (B)LOB data but this post focuses on and issue experienced whilst trying to get the shrink to run.

Although we haven’t pinpointed the cause 100% yet, occasionally there were times when the shrink process would just bomb out after ~2mins with the message below:

File ID 1 of database ID 10 cannot be shrunk as it is either being shrunk by another process or is empty. [SQLSTATE 01000] (Message 5240)

This is usually a message seen when a backup is currently running against that database but in this case it was not. There is a coincidence where the last full backup that run was taking a significantly longer time that it should and this shrink process was trying to run (and bombing out) so it could be linked but to get the process running again there is a little trick you can use and that is to simply increase the database size by “a very small amount”.

In our case we just used 1MB and the script is below:

USE DBNameHere;
GO

SELECT DB_NAME() AS DbName, 
    name AS FileName, 
    type_desc,
    size/128.0 AS CurrentSizeMB,  
    size/128.0 - CAST(FILEPROPERTY(name, 'SpaceUsed') AS INT)/128.0 AS FreeSpaceMB
FROM sys.database_files
WHERE type IN (0,1)
AND DB_NAME() = 'DBNameHere'
GO

-- Use the CurrentSizeMB and add 1MB
USE [master]
GO
ALTER DATABASE [DBNameHere] MODIFY FILE ( NAME = N'DBNameHere', SIZE = 7820225MB )
GO

Hopefully this will be useful for others that may be stuck in a similar situation.