SQL Server Error Log... Some tweaks good to know....

Lots of time we hear about many issues related to SQL Log. I find this is surely one of the area where we depend most but pays least attentions. So today I thought to discuss couple of very simple situations which probably will help us to work with SQL Error log…

One very interesting situation is to know where exactly SQL Log resides. We know we can refer it from SQL Server Management Console/Any third party tool but what if SQL Server is not online and we need to read log by going to their physical location? More interestingly, what if we need to instruct SQL Server to write a log to a different location?
Also another situation I see that many people believe that SQL Server will always store 6 recent most error log only. Actually by default SQL Server stores 6 most recent error logs and you can change this number anywhere from 2 to 99 if you want to customize it.
Default path (where error logs are stored) and number of most recent error log files to be store before recycling is actually defined while we install SQL Server. So we should change these values when ever we need to customize the server. Hopefully this small posts gives us enough clue to perform couple of vital customizations related to SQL Server Logs.
Now here is the direct solutions for the theories I mentioned here… :)

Click here to know the SQL error log location
Click here to change the SQL error log/SQL Agent log path
Click here to change the number SQL Error log files archived before they are recycled

Comments

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