Database AutoGrowth setting is it for good or bad?
IMHO and expereince do not let autogrowth get out of control on your SQL Server database. This is most important factor for the databases capacity planning and with this you might need an additional check-over to confirm the database size levels.
I'm not saying do not use AUTOGROW feature in SQL Server database but don't recommend to rely totally on this setting, but in general I also don't like SQL Server 2000's default growth rate (or max size). In general, I would recommend setting ALL of the transaction log files attributes: initial size, growth rate AND maximum size.
For the growth rate, I recommend something that can be allocated somewhat quickly and something of a fixed size. So, for databases whose transaction logs are under 1GB then you might set autogrow to somewhere between 20 and 100 MB. For those of you who have transaction logs measured in GB, then I'd set the autogrowth to 500MB or 1GB. You might be aware that in SQL Server 2000 while the database is set to AUTOGROW to increase size of data or log file there might be a blocking instance which will have negative performance, where I have seen such postings in forums & newsgroups asking why blocking is happening the code is perfectly optimized with necessary indexes.
So having a disabled AutoGrow feature on SQL Server and setting up Performance Monitor alerts for the database sizing will give additional hand of automated management of database feature.