Keeping your SharePoint 2010 development databases small

With SharePoint 2010 the amount of databases on your SQL server has grown quite a bit. By default most of these databases have their recovery model set to ‘FULL’. After some time you will discover you’re running out of space.

The problem

Most likely the problem lies with the transaction logs of  your databases. With the recovery model set to ‘FULL’ the will keep storing every transaction until you make a backup. Chances are you don’t configure a backup plan for you development environment as most development databases don’t need a backup as your sources will be stored in a source control system.

The (manual) solution

To solve this problem you can change the recovery model of each database by hand. For this you can open SQL Server Management Studio (SMSS), open the properties screen for a database and navigate to the options tab. There you will find the recovery model option.

 
Database Properties screen with the Recovery model set to ‘Simple’.

Saving this change will empty your transaction log. But it will not shrink the physical file on disk. To shrink this file you can look at the "Shrink" task.

 
The context menu’s to shrink the size of the log files.

The (automated) solution

Executing this step for every database manually is quite some work. So you want the easy solution.

The following TSQL script will change the recovery model for every database to ‘simple’ and shrinks the database.

USE [master]
GO

DECLARE @dbname SYSNAME
DECLARE @altercmd NVARCHAR(1000)
DECLARE @shrinkcmd NVARCHAR(1000)

DECLARE [dbcursor] CURSOR FOR SELECT [name] FROM sysdatabases

OPEN [dbcursor]
FETCH NEXT FROM [dbcursor] INTO @dbname

WHILE
    @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
    IF
        (SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX(@dbname, 'RECOVERY')) != 'SIMPLE'
        AND
        @dbname != 'tempdb'
    BEGIN
        SET @altercmd = 'ALTER DATABASE "' + @dbname
                                               + '" SET RECOVERY SIMPLE'
        EXEC (@altercmd)

        SET @shrinkcmd = 'DBCC SHRINKDATABASE ("' + @dbname + '")'
        EXEC (@shrinkcmd)

        PRINT @dbname
    END

    FETCH NEXT FROM [dbcursor] INTO @dbname
END

CLOSE [dbcursor]
DEALLOCATE [dbcursor]