Space Allocation and Reuse

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 is effective at quickly allocating pages to objects and reusing space freed up by deleted rows. These operations are internal to the system and use data structures not visible to users, yet these processes and structures are occasionally referenced in SQL Server messages. This topic is an overview of the space allocation algorithms and data structures to give users and administrators the knowledge needed to understand references to the terms in messages generated by SQL Server.