posted on Thursday, August 24, 2006 1:42 PM
by
joe.sack
SQL Server 2005 Instant File Initialization
I was asked about instant file initialization for SQL Server 2005 yesterday, and also saw a similar question/response on a newsgroup, so I thought I would drop a quick reminder here as well. As you may already know, in SQL Server 2005 data files are initialized immediately when created. Unlike with SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 does not fill the files with zeros during creation or expansion. For large files, skipping this operation can save quite a bit of time.
Notice, however, that the instant file initialization feature applies to data and not transaction log files. If you have large LDF files the must be created, expanded, or restored, you'll still take a performance hit.