Transaction log is full

Posted by Ravi Khanal on Sep 21, 2008

Transaction log is also major cause for slowing the Performance of SQL Server. As a Database Administrator you should monitor your transaction log and check whether it is full or not. Transaction log is a WRITE AHEAD LOG. So whenever there is any data modification in the database, then “before image” and “after image” of any data would be written in the transaction log. If the transactions that are making the data modifications is running or its not being committed then these logs in the transaction log would be the active portion of transaction log. The committed transaction log would be inactive log in the transaction log. The lazy writer thread wakes up after certain period of time and it would write those logs to the physical disks. But sometime if the transaction are too long and its doing lots of updates then it would make the transaction log full and you will get “Out of disk” error. If you are maintaing full Recovery mode and never taking any log backup then its another major cause for transaction log to become full. Transaction log is the important component of SQL Server for recovering from any disaster scenarios. So as a Database Administrator you should always have a close look on the Transaction Log.

So you should use some DBCC command on the regular basis to find out about the Transaction Log.

                       This will tell you how much transaction log is being used.

                       This will tell you about the virtual logs inside the transaction log.

                      This will show you the open transactions or the transaction that are not yet committed. Read the rest of this entry »


Tempdb best practices

Posted by Ravi Khanal on Aug 26, 2008

Tempdb database provides temporary space for various operations and is recreated every time SQL Server is restarted. It is a temporary database to store temporary tables, table variables, cursors, work tables, row versioning. Proper optimization of the tempdb database increases the performance of your SQL Server.

Some of the best Practices for tempdb are: Read the rest of this entry »