On the 10th day of SQL…

The Beginning…
In the spirit of Christmas, Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter) came up with yet another one of those brainy ideas of his. He asked 12 SQL bloggers to each write about their favorite blog post for a 12 Days Of SQL series.

On the 9th Day Of SQL, Kendra Little (Blog | Twitter) brought us a great post about how things are not as simple as they seem. She’s a tough act to follow but I will strive to do my best.

The Post…
I remember hearing advice about deleting a transaction log back when I was working with SQL 2000. It had never occurred to me that you could do this or why you would want to do this and I just accepted it as more crazy stuff to learn in this SQL world. Fast forward years later, while I may not be any smarter I do have more experience and my experience makes me shudder at the thought of deleting the transaction log. A quick search returned some interesting comments regarding the transaction log.

And some interesting answers about what to do…

As a DBA, it is our job to protect the data. I’m not particularly good at updating my resume, so instead I try to remain good at keeping my data and the job that goes with it. Think of being a DBA as the Secret Service of the database world. We are highly trained, highly motivated and nothing is going to come between us and that database. I feel that deleting the transaction log goes against the core values of being a DBA just as shooting the President goes against the core values of the Secret Service. For these reasons, for the 10th day of Christmas and my favorite blog post, I chose:

Deleting The Transaction Log by Gail Shaw (Blog | Twitter).

I love how right away Gail states “The transaction log is not an optional piece of the database.” I couldn’t have said it any better. Gail’s post walks us through the importance of the transaction log and examples of what could happen if you chose to delete the transaction log. I also enjoyed reading the comments of this post as much as I enjoyed reading the post. Gail does a great job of following up and there are important tidbits of wisdom in the comments that are just as important as the details of the post.

Up Next…
Up next is Mike Walsh (Blog | Twitter). I had the great joy of meeting Mike at the PASS summit this year. He shares my love for sushi and SQL and I can’t wait until we run into each other again.

Where we’ve been…

Shamelessly stolen from Kendra’s post with her blessing:

Brent O’s 12 Days of SQL post
Day1: Jeremiah Peschka
Day 2: Grant Fritchey
Day 3: Dave Stein
Day 4: Andy Leonard
Day 5: Erin Stellato
Day 6: Tim Ford
Day 7: Yanni Robel
Day 8: Karen Lopez
Day 9: Kendra Little