How do I find the data directory for a SQL Server instance?

Question

We have a few huge databases (20GB+) which mostly contain static lookup data. Because our application executes joins against tables in these databases, they have t

Answer 1

I stumbled across this solution in the documentation for the Create Database statement in the help for SQL Server:

SELECT SUBSTRING(physical_name, 1, CHARINDEX(N'master.mdf', LOWER(physical_name)) - 1)
                  FROM master.sys.master_files
                  WHERE database_id = 1 AND file_id = 1