Why is my SQL Server 2005 transaction log not growing/updating? - sql-server-2005

I have SQL Server 2005 Database where the transaction log has not updated in a week. The transaction log has recently been truncated due to a situation that used up all available disk space. I have a test database on the same server which is growing daily as expected. What might be the cause of this?

I doubt it's really "not updating" unless you haven't changed the data in the database. Note that the modification date on an MDF/ LDF doesn't typically change, but that doesn't mean the data in the file is not changing. It could be that your DB is in "simple" recovery mode, so the log is working but doesn't grow.

Related

Log Shipping vs Replciation Vs Mirroring in SQL server 2012

I have a SQL Server 2012 database which currently used as a transactional database and reporting database. The application reads/writes into the same database and the reports are also generated against the same database.
Due to some performance issue, I have decided to maintain the two copies of the database. One will be a transactional database which will be accessed by the application. The other database will be the exact copy of the transactional database and it will only be used by the reporting service.
Following are the requirements:
The reporting database should be synched with transactional database in every one hour. That is, the reporting database can have stale data for maximum of 1 hour.
It must be read-only database.
The main intension is NOT recovery or availability.
I am not sure which strategy, transactional log shipping, mirroring or replication, will be best suited in my case. Also if I do the synch operation more frequently (say in every 10 minutes), will there be any impact on the transactional database or the reporting service?
Thanks
I strongly recommend you to use a standby database in readonly state. And every 15 minutes your sqlserveragent has a scheduled job to: a) generate a new .trn logfile within main db, and b) restore it into standby one(your reports db). The only issue is: using this technique your session will be disconnected while agent restores the .trn logfile. But if you can stop the restore job, run your reports and then reactivate it, there is no problem. Seems to be exactly what you need. Or if your reports are fast to run, probably will not be disconnected...if im not wrong restore job can also be configured to wait opened session to finish or to close it. I can check it this last doubt for you tomorrow if you don't find..
Once it is running in the same sql server instance, you don't have to worry about extra licensing...

SQL Server 2008R2 database is offline, and transact log file is full

My database has filled the drive with the transaction log, its about 15GB and the drive is now full. The database won't start. The database is currently offline.
I can access SQL Server Management Studio, but not sure what to do next to fix up the transaction log, and get the database back on line.
You would appear to have the database set to use the Full recovery model.
The log is supposed to be truncated when the database is backed up using a backup tool that integrates with SQL Server (at that point you have a snapshot of the DB at that point in time for recovery), but if you don't have an appropriate regular backup in place, the log tends to bloat out to fill the available disk space.
If you don't require the full recovery model, then change to the Simple Recovery model (right-click on the database node in SSMS, select Properties and go to the Options page) and then shrink the DB.

SQL Server 2005 won't update rows

I currently have a SQL Server 2005 set up and has been running successfully for quite a long period of time without any issues.
As of this morning our website applications have been attempting to perform udpates on various rows. However, every time an update happens the data never gets updated in the database.
Our application's code hasn't been changed in any way, and there appears to be no errors of any kind.
Is there anything in SQL Server that can prevent updates from being performed on a database? Can the size of transaction logs prevent data from being updated on a SQL Server database? Or anything at all that can cause this strange behaviour?
We had similar behaviour on one of our servers and it was due to the log file being on a hard drive that had run out of disk space - so worth checking that.
Also check that the Autogrowth limits haven't been reached:

How to refresh a test instance of SQL server with production data without using full backups

I have two MS SQL 2005 servers, one for production and one for test and both have a Recovery Model of Full. I restore a backup of the production database to the test server and then have users make changes.
I want to be able to:
Roll back all the changes made to the test SQL server
Apply all the transactions that have occurred on the production SQL server since the test server was originally restored so that the two servers have the same data
I do not want to do a full database restore from backup file as this takes far too long with our +200GB database especially when all the changed data is less than 1GB.
EDIT
Based on the suggestions below I have tried restoring a database with NoRecovery but you cannot create a snapshot of a database that is in that state.
I have also tried restoring it to Standby Read only mode which works and I can take a snapshot of the database then and still apply transaction logs to the original db but I cannot make the database writable again as long as there are snapshots against it.
Running:
restore database TestDB with recovery
Results in the following error:
Msg 5094, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The operation cannot be performed on a database with database snapshots or active DBCC replicas
First off, once you've restored the backup and set the database to "recovered", that's it -- you will never be able to apply another transaction log backup to it.
However, there are database snapshots. I've never used them, but I believe you could use them for this purpose. I think you need to restore the database, leave it in "not restored" mode -- definitly not standby -- and then generate snapshots based on that. (Or was that mirroring? I read about this stuff years ago, but never had reason to use it.)
Then when you want to update the database, you drop the snapshot, restore the "next" set of transaction log backups, and create a fresh snapshot.
However, I don't think this would work very well. Above and beyond the management and maintenance overhead of doing this, if the testers/developers do a lot of modifications, your database snapshot could get very big, even bigger than the original database -- and that's hard drive space used in addition to the "original" database. For infrequently modified databases this could work, but for large OLTP systems, I have serious doubts.
So what you really want is a copy of Production to be made in Test. First, you must have a current backup of production somewhere??. Usually on a database this size full backups are made Sunday nights and then differential backups are made each night during the week.
Take the Sunday backup copy and restore it as a different database name on your server, say TestRestore. You should be able to kick this off at 5:00 pm and it should take about 10 hours. If it takes a lot longer see Optimizing Backup and Restore Performance in SQL Server.
When you get in in the morning restore the last differential backup from the previous night, this shouldn't take long at all.
Then kick the users off the Test database and rename Test to TestOld (someone will need something), then rename your TestRestore database to be the Test database. See How to rename a SQL Server Database.
The long range solution is to do log shipping from Production to TestRestore. The at a moments notice you can rename things and have a fresh Test database.
For the rollback, the easiest way is probably using a virtual machine and not saving changes when you close it.
For copying changes across from the production to the test, could you restore the differential backups or transaction log backups from production to the test db?
After having tried all of the suggestions offered here I have not found any means of accomplishing what I outlined in the question through SQL. If someone can find a way and post it or has another suggestion I would be happy to try something else but at this point there appears to be no way to accomplish this.
Storage vendors (as netapp) provide the ability to have writeable snapshots.
It gives you the ability to create a snapshot within seconds on the production, do your tests, and drop/recreate the snapshot.
It's a long term solution, but... It works
On Server1, a job exists that compresses the latest full backup
On Server2, there's a job that performs the following steps:
Copies the compressed file to a local drive
Decompresses the file to make the full backup available
Kills all sessions to the database that is about to be restored
Restores the database
Sets the recovery model to Simple
Grants db_owner privileges to the developers
Ref:http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/archive/2009/02/25/How-to-refresh-a-SQL-Server-database-automatically.aspx

How to rollback changes in SQL Server

By mistake I have updated data on production database. Is there any way to rollback those transactions.
I have executed the update statement from management studio and the script does not have in
Begin Trans/rollback/commit.
Thanks
Here is what I would do in this case:
Restore backup in separate database and compare these databases to recover rows that exist in backup?
If your database is in full recovery mode try reading transaction log to recover the remaining rows.
In order to read transaction log you can use a third party tool such as ApexSQL Log or try to do this yourself through fn_dblog function (here is an example but it’s quite complex).
Here are other posts on this topic:
Read the log file (*.LDF) in SQL Server 2008
How can I rollback an UPDATE query in SQL server 2005?
Without transaction (or indeed even with a committed transaction), there is no easy way to revert the changes made.
Transaction are mostly useful to ensure that a series of changes to the database are performed as a single unit, i.e. so that either all of these changes get performed [in the order prescribed] or that none of them get performed at all (or more precisely that the database server rolls-back whatever changes readily done would there be a problem before all changes are completed normaly).
Depending on the recovery model associated with your database, the SQL log file may be of help in one of two ways:
If you have a backup and if the log file was started right after this backup, the logfile may help "roll forward" the database to the point that preceded the unfortunate changes mentioned in the question. (aka point-in-time restore)
If no such backup is avaiable, the log file may be suitable to reverse the unfortunate changes
Both of these approaches imply that the SQL log was indeed maintained as some of the recovery models, are such that the log file get truncated (its data lost) after each successful batch/transaction. And neither of these approaches is easy, the latter in particular probably require third party software (or a lenghty procedure) etc.
Depending on how your backups are set up, you may be able to do a point in time restore. Talk to your DBA. You may also want to take the DB offline ASAP to prevent more changes that would eventually be lost when you do the restore.