The site on Microsoft says that the size limit for Microsoft SQL server is 2 Terrabytes for the File Size (log), and 16 Terrabytes for the File Size (data). The question now becomes, what is the fundamental difference between File Size (log), and File Size (data)?

---

Reply from Richard Rost:

I'll be completely honest... I'm not entirely sure. I'd have to read up on it some more. I'm a little rusty on my SQL Server since I haven't worked extensively with it in the past 2 or 3 years. I focus more on PRACTICAL applications rather than the trivial things like this... although it is good to know. I just know that for 99.9% of the databases I'm ever going to build or teach people to build, I'm never going to hit that limit. The maximum DATABASE size is 524k terabytes. Since a database can consist of multiple files, there's a 16 TB limitation per FILE. Since there's a 16 TB file size limit under WINDOWS, that makes sense. But just like you can link multiple Access databases together, you can chain multiple SQL server "files" together to form a master database. The 2 TB limit is probably the LOG files (for server maintenance) but again, I'm not entirely sure. If you've got 2 TB of log files sitting around, it's time to do some analysis and deleting. :)