Question:
Our Web server (NT 4.0) became inoperable over the weekend due to a SQL Server error that stated that the “applications log file is full”.
From what I understand, this has happened once before and I am wondering what we can do about it. Is there some kind of setting to change, or will some kind of maintenance program be written? Or other?
To fix the problem, all we did was reboot the system but we really don’t want to be doing this because it is running on the Web.
One more thing of interest: the screen was partially frozen so that the Start menu could not be accessed but the desktop could.
Answer:
I think you have run out of log space. When the log gets written, there is a checkpoint marker written to it that you no longer have space for.
See if you can DUMP TRANSACTION YourDatabaseName WITH NO_LOG and immediately dump the database, as you now will have no log. Then do dbcc checktable(syslogs) to correct the space reported and run sp_spaceused syslogs to see the result.
In the future, you may want to set up an alert against Performance Monitor to watch the growth of your log’s size. Then you can decide how you want to handle it?whether you want to dump the transaction log or dump the database. (Keep making incremental dumps after an initial dump with INIT until you find time to dump the database.) Check out error 1105 in the Books On Line documentation for SQL Server.
Good luck with it.
