A poorly managed database table has grown to be enormous. 48+gigs of orphan records. I am trying to clean it up and put my dangerously full hard drive back to a normal state. I will be deleting approx 400 million records from this table. This is running as I type. I notice that I am not seeing any drop in my hard drive space but I am seeing the memory drop on system table queries, I am running to get table size. The database is using "Simple Recovery Model".

There are many questions similar to this with responses saying you need to shrink the database. But they go on to explain how bad/scary this is to do because of fragmented data etc. 


Since the database should not be this size. Is it still bad for me to shrink it?
This is a production database. If I shrink it will it cause downtime or lock the database?
In SQL Server Management Studio you have two options for shrink, database or files. Given my situation what would be the best option?
is there a rule on the percentage of free space a DB should have?


Even reading the tag description of shrink makes me not want to do it. Is there another way?


Question: Cannot shutdown Tomcat - transport Error
Answer: Tomcat uses a different port for connections and for the command to shutdown.
By default the port is 8005.  E.g. from server.xml

&lt;Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"&gt;


The error you get indicates a conflict in ports.
Is it being used by another process? Are you doing remote debugging?
Change the ports to resolve conflict