By: Brady Upton
In this tutorial, we’ll go over some of the tasks you can do to manage the transaction log. The transaction log is very important to SQL Server and there are books alone that discuss how to manage the log so this will be an introduction tutorial to the transaction log.
Some questions that I hope to answer in this tutorial include:
- What is the transaction log?
- Why does SQL Server require a transaction log?
- What is a transaction?
- What does BEGIN TRAN, ROLLBACK TRAN, and COMMIT TRAN mean?
- What is a nested transaction?
- How does Mirroring, Replication, and Log Shipping use the transaction log?
- Why does the transaction log grow?
- What is a Virtual Log File (VLF)?
- How to monitor transaction log growth.
- How to shrink the transaction log.
- How large should the transaction log be?
- Do multiple transaction logs help performance?
- What are the recovery models and how does the log use them?
- How to recover data using a transaction log backup.
