Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Ruminating on Transaction Logs

Understanding the working of transaction logs for any RDBMS is very important for any application design. Found the following good articles that explain the important concepts in a simple language.

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/managing-transaction-logs-in-sql-server/
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/understanding-the-importance-of-transaction-logs-in-sql-server/5173108

Any database consists of log files and data files. In the MS world, they are known as *.ldf and *.mdf files respectively. All database transactions (modifications) are first written to the log file. There is a separate thread (or bunch of threads) that writes from the buffer cache to the data file periodically.  Once data is written to a data-file, a checkpoint is written to the transaction log. This checkpoint is used as a reference to "roll forward" all transactions. i.e. All transactions after the last checkpoint are applied to the datafile when the server is restarted after a failure. This prevents transactions from being lost that were in the buffer but not yet written to the data file.

Transaction logs are required for rollback, log shipping, backup, etc. The transaction log files should be managed by a DBA or else we would run into problems if the log file fills up all the available hard disk space. The DBA should also periodically back-up the log files. The typical back-up commands also truncate the log files. In some databases, the truncation process just marks old records as inactive so they can be overwritten. In such cases, even after truncation, the size of the log file does not reduce and we may have to use different commands to compact or shrink the log files.

A good post on truncation options for SQL Server 2008 is given below:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/380879/About-transaction-log-and-its-truncation-in-SQL-Se

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