OK, my shop has a shrink job that runs every night. It shrinks the data and log files. DBCC SHRINKFILE (filename,1). We have recovery model Simple.
So reading that SHRINK is horrible for the data file because of fragmentation, so looking to stop the daily job. BUt this job has been running everyday for years right after the ETL. We have a big nightly ETL process that (1) truncates several hundred SQL tables and then BULK INSERT from the AS400 (2) for really large tables we just bring in the last X number of days from the AS400 and insert those records into the SQL table. We have very few indexes, but do have some on the really large tables. FYI - The SQL Servers are at the clients' sites.
What kind of fragmentation has the SHRINK on the data file caused? how would it affect the ETL, and retrieval of data during the day? how can the fragmentation be fixed?