What to do if Azure SQL Managed Instance reaches the max storage limit?

Question

Azure SQL Managed Instance can reach the storage limit if the total sum of sizes of the database (both user and system) reaches the instance limit. In this case the following issues might happen:

• Any operation that updates data or rebuild structures might fail because it cannot be written in the log.
• Some read-only queries might fail if they require tempdb that cannot grow.
• Automated backup might not be taken because database must perform checkpoint to flush the dirty pages to data files, and this action fails because there is no space.

How to resolve this problem is the managed instance reaches the storage limit?

Answer 1

There are several way to resolve this issue:

• Increase the instance storage limit using portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI.
• Decrease the size of database by using DBCC SHRINKDB, or dropping unnecessary data/tables (for example #temporary tables in tempdb)

The preferred way is is to increase the storage because even if you free some space, next maintenance operation might fill it again.