How to view ldf file sql server 2005

One individual file is used by one database and log information is stored in another file. The SQL Server transaction log file stores enough information to undo or rollback a change in database, or recover database to a specific point in time from corruption situation. Due to all these recovery requirements, user often needs to open LDF file and view its contents.

But this task is not that much easy. You can also try its demo version to get a fair idea about software. After auditing the file thoroughly, it is easy to restore any modified or changed record back into the system. Further, we look forward to some indirect manual procedures. But, to use these functions users must have SQL Server Management Studio and the database attached to it whose data you are going to audit.

Although, no information is in a readable format. So, it will take more time to understand every detail. Always remember it is an undocumented function. In a program that i am writitng i need to read the content of log file for a certain database. I google a little bit and found that ldf is binary file. But i was no able to find the format of the file or any tutorial showing how to read this file. I am writing the program on C but any examples on any programing languages will be greatly appreciated.

The format of the log file is not documented and not public, even the commercial log readers will not pick up everything from the log - they most likely will of reverse engineered it or hired ex-SQL developers who know about it. Before you concern yourself with decoding the physical file start by trying to decode the output from:.

That will get you a formatted output of the log and the log binary data in a field - even that is not trivial to decode. As well as the log file format, you will have to have a very indepth knowledge of SQL itself to understand the entries properly.

Overall - I think you are better off buying one of the existing commercial packages, because if you need to ask about the format - your internal knowledge of SQL is unlikely to be good enough. This is a commercial tool but it has a free trial.

Every DBMS are implemented to keep you away from filesystem, as it's supposed to deal with operational system details and to provide concurrency, for instance.

If you try to read that LDB from a running database you'll add weight in somewhere not designed to support it. Maybe you just want to check who made some database update; in this case, you can to use triggers to log into a regular database table , a timestamp and current user.

If you do find how the file is formatted let the rest of us know. One thing that you can do is, to detach the ReportServer database, rename the log file, and then attach it back to the database server. While attaching, make sure that you dont attach the older one, instead, you can create a new one with default size. However, doing this in production, needs close monitoring. Another thing that you can try out is as mentioned in the above response.

Refer to the link for more details. However, it is adviced to have appropriate maintenance plan to make sure that the transaction log doesnt grow to unmanagable size.

Refer to this link for more details on importance of transaction log maintenance. You will need to do that so it will clear down the log.