SQL Server 2000 Database Doesn't Shrink After Removing Columns

If you've ever come across a situation where you've removed text, ntext or image columns from a SQL Server 2000 database, and the size of your database doesn't shrink even after compressing it, you may have run into the problem described here:

DBCC SHRINKFILE and SHRINKDATABASE commands may not work because of sparsely populated text, ntext, or image columns

The solution is to create a DTS package to transfer all of your database objects into a new database, and remove the old one, and then rename the new one to your original database name (if necessary). We did this recently and recovered 50% of the disk space wasted.

Hopefully this problem was solved in SQL Server 2005.