ENT Server is slow and/or I'm getting lots of "Timeout expired" error messages

Under the hood, ENT Server is using an MS SQL Server database. These databases are made up of two files:

1. A data file, which contains all the actual data in the various tables in the database
2. A log file, which is used to ensure that transactions are atomic and basically to maintain the integrity of the data files.

The log file will keep a log of all transactions that ever take place on the database - which means it's keeping track of quite a lot of activity. As a result, over time the log file for your ENT Server databases may grow and grow until reads and writes to this file start taking a very long time and eventually until you run out of disk space (this file will quite happily grow well over 100 GB in size if left for a long time).

As such, it may pay on occassion to do a little bit of house keeping - basically throwing out old log information that isn't likely to be useful anymore... for example the fact that a transaction involving the writing of data to a couple of tables succeeded 6 months ago. This can be achived by issuing the following SQL commands to your database server:

USE master
BACKUP LOG mf_enterprise WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
USE mf_enterprise
DBCC SHRINKFILE(mf_enterprise_log, 2)
USE master
BACKUP LOG mf_enterprise WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

Note: The above commands will result in the permanant loss of data and you should perform a full backup of your databases before doing this.

Probably you won't have to do this very often but you might also like to setup a batch file that issues these commands to your SQL Server using oSQL (or similar) and have this batch file run as a scheduled task in Windows every couple of months so that you don't have to think about it again.