Trying to figure-out why your log file for a particular database is not “naturally” shrinking is the first steps you need to take in order to diagnose and resolve a large SQL Server transaction log file.

Transaction Log files generally grow because there is something that is stopping SQL Server from reusing the already allocated space to this file, which will essentially cause the Transaction Log file to grow (as per the growth configuration settings) in order to keep the database operational. This could be caused by a natural increase in utilization for that database, or by a blockage (an active operation running too long, or waiting on mirroring to complete), so before deciding how to proceed with resolving a large Transaction Log file, it is highly recommended to figure out why did this happen.

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Managing space on your SQL Server Transaction Log can sometimes be daunting, usually if you have a good backup strategy, and a well moderated database (in terms of monitoring and flagging long running transactions), then you will rarely run into unexpected large growth of your transaction log file. But in the real world this is rarely the case, and there will be occasions when you leave a very long transaction running over night (or days), or there is a schedule clash between two queries, or between a query and the backup schedule, which caused a failure in your log truncation strategy.

The daunting part is making sure that you recover from the situation with minimum data loss and disruption to the database’s recovery strategy. In this post I will go through the most common scenarios of transaction log growth, and how to resolve them.
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