Huge SharePoint_Config Database/Timer Job History Overflow

Question

Hello All,
I know there are quite a few sites about this issue, but none of them seem to work for me so I was hoping for some help.
Just for reference, this is in my dev environment on a VM running:
SP2010
SQL Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2
It is the same old story of SharePoint's "Delete Job History" timer job not running and therefor the “TimerJobHistory” database table growing massive. For the last couple of months
my drive keeps running out of space and putting a halt to my work. So I went to the Net looking for a solution. I found a few that looked promising, but either caused more problems or simply did not work. Now that I have my environment back up and running
I was hoping for some help in solving this.
Does anyone know how to purge the “TimerJobHistory” table so my SharePoint_Config database will not keep filling up my space? From there is there anyway to prevent this from happening again?
The “Delete Job History” will not run currently even though I have adjusted the days to keep history and increased the duration that the job should run.
So far here is what I tried and the results:
http://sharepoint.it-professional.co.uk/?p=228 – Runs for a while and seems promising, but keeps growing the log and database
file until out of space, then crashes. I have to spend a lot of time freeing up space, detaching, and reattaching the config database. At this point I have removed everything from that drive that I can so no more space can be freed.
Shrinking files – This is only a temporary fix and I heard that it is a bad idea to do this more than once every now and again anyway. I am sure my database is already fragmented terribly
(which also if anyone can point me to a working solution for defragging in SQL Server 2008 R2 I would greatly appreciate it.)
There are a number of other sites that make recommendations that seem to be… well… less than what would be considered a “good practice” so I avoided those.
For the time being I have done what I had hoped not to and turned the SharePoint Timer service off to prevent the database from filling up again. If I turn it back on the log fill will be full
in a matter of seconds which will move me back to no space and in a bad position.
This seems to be happening to all the devs here, but I got a bit too brave and tried to find a solution… I learn a lot from my mistakes though!
If any other information is needed, please let me know.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks,
J.

Answer 1

Hi,
We need to reduce the amount of data being deleted by the timer job during each run, so I need to modify the daystokeephistory value of the timer job.
The following PowerShell script for your reference:
$history = Get-SPTimerJob | Where-Object {$_.name -eq "job-delete-job-history"}
$history.daystokeephistory = 25
$history.update()
$history.runnow()
More information:
http://convergingpoint.blogspot.com/2012/05/sharepoint-configuration-database-too.html
http://www.techgrowingpains.com/2012/01/out-of-control-sharepoint_config-database/
Best Regards
Dennis Guo
TechNet Community Support