Hi Gerard,

No, you are not missing much here. MS SQL Server transaction log is mostly used internally for commit and rollback processing as well for backup and recovery. The developer does not have easy access to the log as its purpose is for what I mention above.

Here's some information to help with this.

Let's say you perform a full daily data backup of your database every night. But on a given day, say, late in the day, you have a disk crash (or some event that requires recovery of data). Well, if you haven't backed up your transaction log, you would probably only be able to recover your data as of the previous evenings backup thereby losing a full day's work.

If, however, you back up your transaction log, say every hour, you would then be able to recover from your previous nights back up and then apply each log backup up until the time you crashed, thereby only losing at most 1 hour of work.

The existence of third party tools tells you that these companies' have recognized the opportunity to fill a need left blank by Microsoft, but if you practice sound backup procedures using the tools already provided, you may not need them.

Remember also, that your log file will grow quite large if you do not purge it, especially if you have a data intensive application, so make sure you have scheduled log backups and dumps to keep your disks as clean as necessary.

Read up more on this to educate yourself more as data recovery is an important feature of any data intensive application.

HTH

Bob

>Hi.
>I have made some enquiries as to the possibility / ease of accessing the Transaction Log from Sql Server.
>It would appear that Microsoft do not provide any tools to do this, and any such tools must be purchased from Third parties
>I have identified about 4 of these, all of which vary in cost.
>
>One of the main selling points of Sql Server seems to be this Transaction Log ... everything is Logged, complete Auditability and so on.
>Then you discover that the devloper of the product (i.e. Microsoft) does not provide the tools to access this data easily ???
>
>Sounds a bit like saying that a new house you are going to buy has a super duper bathroom , but you can never use it
>
>Am I missing out something here ???
>
>Any comments apprecaited
>Regards,
>Gerard