I'm looking for guidelines and ideas on where staging tables should be placed. We have an application that needs about 10 staging tables for data to be stored from Excel and text files. From there stored procedures would be called in SSIS packages to work with the data in the staging tables and do modifications to the "real", "permanent" tables in the database. My question about all of this is, "Where should these staging tables be placed?" The tables will be loaded and then truncated once the data has been used to update the real tables. The database is already 1.6 TB in size. I don't yet know how much data would be flowing into and out of these staging tables and I would like to avoid the dead weight of free space on the database from these staging tables and the extra activity in the transaction log backups from the Inserts to the staging tables. This activity is also going to increase the size of my daily differential backup. I have a database on the same SQL instance that I could put these staging tables in that is only 48 MB in size right now. Adding a few GB of size to this database would not be a big deal, but if I put the staging tables in this database then I am making that database be a necessary part of maintaining the primary database. Is that something I should consider doing anyway? So, the question is, "Do I put the staging tables in the main database or in a separate database?" Is there a best practice and why is that the best practice?
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