Jeff Moden (10/1/2013)

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halifaxdal (10/1/2013)

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I did the following to empty ldf: 1. Put the recovery mode to simple; 2. dbcc shrinkdatabase('database_name')

This made the ldf to minimum from 99GB down to 1M

I then tried to delete redundant records in one of the problematic table that has 25877065 records, apparently my command is wrong:

delete table where id > 20877065

the ldf file gets increased immediately and dramatically to GB level and the query is still running. I don't know if it would fail again due to running out of space. Should I continue waiting or should I terminate it?

And how to remove those redundant records?

Thanks.

Heh... you move too fast. Shrinking the database just fragmented every index you have to 99%. If you have Point-in-time backups running, you also just broke the log chain by putting the DB into the SIMPLE recovery mode. If you don't have Point-in-Time backups running, you should seriously consider it even if it's "just" a Dev database.

If you're doing deletes and you didn't take a backup just prior to doing the deletes, you may hate yourself in the morning when someone says you deleted to much or you deleted the wrong data.