Reduce the size of a .MDF file when deleting data through Entity Framework

Is it possible to shrink manually the size of a .mdf file from the Entity Framework, or at least turn on the Auto Shrink option?

I've read in some places that it is not recommended, but that is a customer requirement (t开发者_StackOverflow社区o reduce the size of the file when data is deleted).

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This is not an EF task/issue. It is a SQL Server maintenance task. You are correct when you shrink the files/database you leave your data fragmented. You would want to defragment immediately after.

I would not recommend making this a common behavior. Unless you are doing VERY large deletes the amount of space reclaimed is probably negligible. If you do need to shrink I would plan during low volume/down time and do the defragment as well.

I would inform your customer of this nature of this task and build a normal maintenance schedule to perform these types of DB activities. This would be a best practice approach.

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Connect to database via standard SqlConnection and execute required operations. EF is not intended for this.