Usually it keeps it until something else needs more memory. It's done like that for performance reasons because it's faster to read data from memory than it is to read from disk. Whatever data pages were loaded into memory buffers remain there unless that memory is needed by another application.

Roman

>When monitoring our server (SQL2000) I notice that after a reboot (once a week), memory usage starts out about 10% (of 2gb) and over a day or so climbs to 80% and stays there until the next reboot. Is this normal? Should SQL release memory when it is no longer needed?
>
>TIA
>John