Checking Summary Information for a Table

Issue sp_spaceused with a table name to view information about a specific table.

For example:
sp_spaceused titles
name   rowtotal reserved  data    index_size unused
------ -------- --------- ------- ---------- -----
titles 18       48 KB     6 KB    4 KB       38 KB

The rowtotal column may be different than the results of running select count(*) on the table. This is because sp_spaceused computes the value with the built-in function rowcnt. That function uses values that are stored in the allocation pages. These values are not updated regularly, however, so they can be very different for tables with a lot of activity. update statistics, dbcc checktable, and dbcc checkdb update the rows-per-page estimate, so rowtotal is most accurate after you have run one of these commands.

Run sp_spaceused regularly on syslogs, since the transaction log can grow rapidly if there are frequent database modifications. This is particularly a problem if the transaction log is not on a separate device, which means it competes with the rest of the database for space.