What happens when you hit the SQL Server Express 4GB / 10GB limit?

Question

What kind of error occurs? What do users experience? Can you access the database using tools and what if you get it back under the 4GB / 10GB limit?

Answer 1

As I understand it you will start to see exception messages appear within your event log, such as:

Could not allocate space for object 'dbo.[table]' in database '[database]' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup.

If you can then reduce the size of the database, you can then continue to add etc as before. Tools should carry on working regardless of the database size.

Hope this helps!