We are hosting a new Umbraco 7 site with the database on SQL server 2012 Express. The database seems to be growing rapidly. It's currently about 5Gb and SQL 2012 express has a maximum database size of 10Gb so we are starting to get a little concerned. The cmsPropertyData and cmsPreviewXml seem to be taking up the most space at about 2.5Gb each. Is there any general housekeeping that needs to be done to keep these tables under control. Have tried shrinking the database but there is no unused space.
Any Advice?
I don't know for sure this is the problem in your case, but Umbraco creates a new version of the content node each time the node is saved. This can cause your database to grow rapidly. There's a cool package that automatically removes older versions called "UnVersion". https://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/unversion/