Introduction

If you are reading this article is because you read about the SQL Server transaction log and you want to go to the LSN to restore information. This article will explain what is the LSN and show some tables, views, and system functions used to retrieve LSN information. We will also learn how to restore information using the Transaction Log information. We will also find out if there is a Go LSN command. So, if you want to learn more about the transaction log and want to recover some information using the logs, you are in the right place.

This is the last article, but not the least one, in the SQL Server Transaction Log series. In this series of articles (see the TOC below), we described the Transaction Log concept from four different aspects.

If this is your first visit to this SQL Server Transaction Log series, I recommend you first review the previous articles (see the TOC below), in order not to be familiar with the concepts that we will discuss in this article. Reviewing the previous articles, you will have a good idea about the following:

In this article, we will go through a number of SQL Server Transaction Log recommendations and best practices that each database administrator needs to follow in order to enjoy his holidays and have a pleasant sleep without nightmares or calls during the night.

In the previous articles of this series (see TOC at bottom), we discussed the main concept of the SQL Server transaction, the internal architecture of the SQL Server Transaction Log and finally the Virtual Log File and the best practices in managing the VLFs. In this article, we will go through the relationship between the SQL Server Transaction Log and the three database recovery models.

In this article we’ll review SQL Virtual Log files aka SQL Server VLFs, providing an overview and review topics related to size, performance, monitoring and troubleshooting.