SQL server error log size is too big to handle

Question

I am working with a large database on windows sql server 2008 R2 such that it has to run continuously 24x7 because of that it is not possible
to restart the server time to time. It is kind of monitoring system for big machines. Because of this SQL server error logs are growing too big even some times up to 60-70 GB at a limited sized hard drive. I can't delete them time to time manually. Can someone
please suggest a way using which I can stop creation of such error logs or recycle them after sometime. Most of the errors are of this kind --
Setting database option RECOVERY to simple for database db_name
P.S.- I have read limiting error logs to 6 etc. But that didn't help. It will be best if you could suggest some method to disable these logs.

Answer 1

Hi Mohit11,
According to your description, your SQL Server error logs are growing too big to handle at a limited sized hard drive, and you want to know how to stop the generation of such error logs or recycle them after sometime automatically without restarting the
SQL Server, right?
As others mentioned above, we may not be able to disable SQL server error log generation. However we can recycle the error logs automatically by running the
sp_cycle_errorlog on a fixed schedule (i.e. every two weeks) using SQL agent jobs so that the error logs will be recycled
automatically without restarting SQL Server.
And it is also very important for us to keep the error log files more readable. So we can increase the number of error logs a little more and run the sp_cycle_errorlog more frequently (i.e. daily), then each file will in a smaller size to be more readable
and we can recycle the log files automatically.
In addition, in order to avoid the size of all the log files growing into a too big size unexpected (sometime it may happen), we can run the following query in SQL Agent job to automatically delete all the old log files when the size of log files is larger
than some value we want to keep (i.e. 30GB):
--create a tample table to gather the information of error log files
CREATE TABLE #ErrorLog
Archieve INT,
Dt DATETIME,
FileSize INT
GO
INSERT INTO #ErrorLog
EXEC xp_enumerrorlogs
GO
--delete all the old log files if the size of all the log files is larger than 30GB
DECLARE @i int = 1;
DECLARE @Log_number int;
DECLARE @Log_Max_Size int = 30*1024; --here is the max size (M) of all the error log files we want to keep, change the value according to your requirement
DECLARE @SQLSTR VARCHAR(1000);
SET @Log_number = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #ErrorLog);
IF (SELECT COUNT(FileSize/1024/1024) FROM #ErrorLog) >= @Log_Max_Size
BEGIN
WHILE @i <= @Log_number
BEGIN
SET @SQLSTR = 'DEL C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG.' + CONVERT(VARCHAR,@i);
EXEC xp_cmdshell @SQLSTR;
SET @i =@i + 1;
END
END
DROP TABLE #ErrorLog
For more information about How to manage the SQL Server error log, please refer to the following article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2199578
If you have any question, please feel free to let me know.
Regards,
Jerry Li