I have a SQL Server 2000 I need to upgrade to SQL Server 2005. In considering different ways of doing this (side-by-size, overlay, move to a new machine entirely) I set up a SQL 2000 instance on a DEV server and started playing around with the master database. Here are a couple of things I encountered that are worth sharing. [Read more…] about Working With the Master Database
Backup and Recovery
Shrinking and Sizing Transaction Logs
It’s true that you don’t want to continually shrink and grow the log file for a few different reasons including fragmentation and incurring the overhead of growing files during a request. However, if you have decided that your transaction log is in fact too large and needs to be shrunk, here is one way to go about it. [Read more…] about Shrinking and Sizing Transaction Logs
Log File Size For DB Restores
Keep the size of the transaction log file in mind when you are restoring a database.
Over the weekend, the backup drive on one of our servers ran out of space. Without transaction log backups, the log grew several times until it consumed the log disk. At that point SQL choked.
We straightened out the SQL problems and things ran smoothly the rest of the weekend. Today we went to restore the backup to a test server. At this point we ran into a problem I haven’t seen before but should’ve anticipated–the backup wouldn’t restore. [Read more…] about Log File Size For DB Restores