Archive for February, 2010

February 2010 IT Toolbox – TechNet Magazine Online

Friday, February 19th, 2010

The February 2010 TechNet Magazine posts on the website. Check out my IT Toolbox column here:

February 2010 TechNet Magazine IT Toolbox

In this issue I covered:

  • Input Director: Control multiple Windows systems with one keyboard and mouse
  • IPNetInfo: Query multiple WHOIS servers on sets of IP addresses
  • QweryBuilder: Manage multiple database types through one interface

Check it out and let me know what you think!

And if you have a tool you want to see me review, please suggest it to me here: tntools@microsoft.com.

Posted in Microsoft TechNet | No Comments »

Shrinking your Transaction Log with SQL Server 2008 to Free Disk Space

Friday, February 5th, 2010

If you have been used to clearing up disk space on your development and test SQL server instance file systems with SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 by using the famous TRUNCATEONLY option on your transaction logs, you might be disheartened that they have removed this option from SQL Server 2008 (with good reason some might say).

If you do try to use it, you will get the infamous:

‘TRUNCATEONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option.

To achieve the same effect with SQL Server 2008, you can toggle the recovery mode for the target database and then call your DBCC SHRINKFILE to clear up disk space hogged by your transaction log.

USE MyDatabase
GO
ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET RECOVERY SIMPLE
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE('MyDatabase_log',1)
GO
ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET RECOVERY FULL
GO

(Of course if you are already using simple recovery, you wouldn’t need to toggle.)

Hope this helps!

Posted in MS SQL Server, T-SQL | No Comments »