How do shrink *right* when required? I've been reading all the articles (and comments) linked from Stop Shrinking Your Database Files. Seriously. Now. I understand that shrinking is bad.

What I have a hard time figuring out is how to do it right when its actually required. 

The backstory is that I have inherited this archive DB with a handful of tables containing PDF's that should have been expired after 5 years, but the procedures to do this on a schedule was never set up. I don't have the row counts at the moment but it's a few million, and about 3TB. I guesstimate about half of this will be deleted and never come back.

I've been talking to our infrastructure providers DBA, but I find the advice they give (delete, reindex then shrink) to be highly dubious. I'm a system consultant not a DBA, but it seems I get to play one this time :-/

Paul Randal recommends two approaches

1


  
  Create a new filegroup
  Move all affected tables and indexes into the new filegroup 
  using the CREATE INDEX … WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON) ON syntax, to move the
  tables and remove fragmentation from them at the same time
  Drop the old filegroup that you were going to shrink anyway (or shrink it way down if its the primary filegroup)
  


Unfortunately I don't have access to the actual server just SSMS, and this is quite a bit outside my comfort zone anyway. I'm not actually a DBA..

2


  DBCC INDEXDEFRAG or ALTER INDEX … REORGANIZE.


Yes but how.. there are quite a few parameters to choose from, and this seems optimized to get the size absolutely minimal, and not what I need which is to get rid of the bloat while keeping the DB as healthy as possible.

In other words I don't care if the DB grows some, it needs space to operate and it will grow some as document production increases year by year, but the nightly, weekly or monthly purging will now keep this in check.

I should also add that I can take this DB offline at night without much trouble.
The recommendation from your Providers DBA is sufficient for your needs.  I would add the additional step of checking to make sure you don't have any heaps, however.  When you delete records from Heaps the space is not always made available and you won't have a good way of reorganizing it.  If you can, add a clustered index to the heap before deleting (or after, dealers choice).  If you cannot, I would delete, add a clustered index and then remove it.  

SELECT T.name AS TableName
    , I.* FROM sys.indexes AS I
    INNER JOIN sys.tables AS T ON T.object_id = I.object_id
WHERE I.type_desc = 'HEAP'


So, my steps would be:


Check for Heaps and decide on course of action. 
purge data (preferably in chunks), check-pointing or backing up the log as
applicable. 
defragment indexes (Ola Hallengren's scripts will help
here if you don't have your own).  Do this first so that pages can be readjusted to the correct fill factor.  Otherwise, space used estimate will be off since a partially used page is counted as a full page and you will probably have lots of partially full pages that can be consolidated without impact.
Look at current database file size
used.  Shrink to appropriate size (I like to leave at least 20% empty
space in the file.   
Defragment your indexes again since the shrink moved everything around.
Take the time to evaluate file growth settings
to make sure they make sense for your environment.  Usually growing
in fixed size rather than as a percentage and make sure you have
instant file initialization turned on.


This will tell you how much space is actually being used in the file.

SELECT DB_NAME() AS DatabaseName
, F.name
, F.type_desc 
, F.state_desc 
, F.file_id 
, F.growth 
, F.max_size
, F.is_percent_growth
, F.physical_name
, F.size/128.0 AS CurrentSize_MB
, FILEPROPERTY(F.name, 'SpaceUsed')/128.0 AS SpaceUsed_MB
 FROM sys.database_files F