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Thursday, December 6, 2007

Shrinking the Transaction Log

Most of the time the transaction log file growth to very huge size until your harddisk not able to take it. What can i do is shrinking the log file.

Remember: Always take full backup before this activity.

There are few ways to do this but i like to use detach and attach method. You can choose whether using enterprise manager or T-SQL. I like to use T-SQL.

t-sql
  • sp_detach_db [dbname]
  • Delete the disk log file.
  • sp_attach_single_file_db [dbname], [filename]where [filename] is the name of the physical data file (.mdf).






Example:
I have a database name RatePost and the .mdf and .ldf physical location
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RatePost.mdf
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RatePost_log.ldf

  1. Open my enterprise manager and open a new query window.
  2. Type sp_detach_db RatePost in the query window and run the script
  3. Go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\" and delete RatePost_log.ldf
  4. Clear the query window and type
    sp_attach_single_file_db RateMyPosts, 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RatePost.mdf' and run the script
  5. After you have run your script, you can see in Message window
    File activation failure. The physical file name "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RatePost_log.ldf" may be incorrect.
    New log file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\RatePost_log.ldf' was created.

Now you go to check your log file size reduce and back to around 500Kbyte.

Done.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bravo, this idea is necessary just by the way