I need to view the transaction logs of a database on SQL Server 2008 in order to find a delete transaction and hopefully roll it back.
Unfortunately I have no clue where to start, and I'm finding it difficult to determine which are good articles on Google.
What should I do?
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I accidentally deleted a whole bunch of data in the wrong environment and this post was one of the first ones I found.
Because I was simultaneously panicking and searching for a solution, I went for the first thing I saw - ApexSQL Logs, which was $2000 which was an acceptable cost.
However, I've since found out that Toad for Sql Server can generate undo scripts from transaction logs and it is only $655.
Lastly, found an even cheaper option SysToolsGroup Log Analyzer and it is only $300.
You can't read the transaction log file easily because that's not properly documented. There are basically two ways to do this. Using undocumented or semi-documented database functions or using third-party tools.
Note: This only makes sense if your database is in full recovery mode.
SQL Functions:
DBCC LOG and fn_dblog - more details here and here.
Third-party tools:
Toad for SQL Server and ApexSQL Log.
You can also check out several other topics where this was discussed:
Source: Stackoverflow.com