Greetings and other salutations,

Today I found out that part of the development environment was in “Full Recovery Mode”.  This means that if someone isn’t taking log backups, their databases get huge, and it also means that the backups were much bigger than they should have been.  They don’t need point in time recovery in our development environment so we decided to move them to “Simple recovery”. This could have been a big all day job if I went through the GUI, but you know me, I found a way to script it out and thought I would share it. I am showing you how to do it on one server at a time:

Connect to your development server in the master database and run this query to see how many are in “Full Recovery”:

 SELECT name, recovery_model_desc
 FROM sys.databases
 WHERE recovery_model_desc = 'FULL'

When I ran it on one of my servers, there were 24 databases that needed to be adjusted. So I built this:

 SELECT 'ALTER DATABASE [' + name + '] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE ;'
 FROM sys.databases
 WHERE recovery_model_desc = 'Full'

Then I took the results from that query and copied it into a new window and ran it and just like that, all my databases are now in “Simple Mode” in Development. I ran the first query one more time to make sure everything updated as expected.

It is a beautiful thing. I hope this helps you clean up development too!

The song from this post is from the Kongo’s Take it from Me