Huge Transaction Log - Is This Normal?

Question

I have a 5GB database and a 20GB transaction log (SQL Server 2005). Not sure why it is so large or what happened to make it that large, it used to be around 1/2 the size of

Answer 1

Besides the checking of what recovery model is used on the database, you can go even further regarding the "what happened to make it that large" - you can read it and see what type of transactions and how many of them are saved in the log. Furthermore, you can inspect when the transactions occurred and who executed them

To do that, you can use either native SQL Server functions fn_dblog, DBCC PAGE or fn_dump_dblog or some 3rd party tool. However, the native functions are not documented and it's very hard to understand the results they provide. As for a 3rd party tool, you can check the Open LDF file and view LDF file content online article for more details and deeper analysis of what it takes to read the transaction log information

Disclaimer: I work as a Product Support Engineer at ApexSQL