Windows – SQL Log, can I delete this file? SQLDump10000.txt

The company I work for offers software to people in certain regulated industries so generally I have the "never delete anything" attitude because if you delete anything you have lost the completeness of your audit trail. Instead mark the information as deleted (or move it to an archive version of the tables) and record who "deleted" it and when.

The only reasons to really delete stuff are

• if you are running out of space (but disk is cheap these days)
• for efficiency (but if your data structure is well indexed and not badly fragmented this will make little difference)
• for legal reasons (if you are asked to remove someone's details you will most likely have to comply, depending on local data protection laws, or if the content itself infringes some law)

Your users may be thankful of nothing getting really deleted, if they accidentally delete something useful and you can get it back. And if an upset user who has previously provided valuable information to the site throws a hissy fit and deletes all their posts in vengeance you can retract the deletions easily.

One extra very important point: you shuold make it clear in your terms of service that information may not be really deleted when the user can not see it any more, and provide a route (if only "email x@x.x and ask for it to be done") for them to really delete data they have the right under relevant laws to ask to be deleted.

In SQL Server Management Studio right-click your database and select Tasks / Generate Scripts. Follow the wizard and you'll get a script that recreates the data structure in the correct order according to foreign keys. On the wizard step titled "Set Scripting Options" choose "Advanced" and modify the "Types of data to script" option to "Schema and data"

TIP: In the final step select "Script to a New Query Window", it'll work much faster that way.