More and more of our customers are using SQL Reporting Services now. It’s a very powerful and flexible reporting platform but it comes with one big caveat: left to its own devices, the report services database log file can quickly expand to firstly fill your hard disk, then your server room, before oozing out and down the stairs to take over the world.

The simplest way of keeping it under control is to include it in your maintenance plan (you do have a maintenance plan, don’t you?).

A typical maintenance plan would go through the following steps:

1. backup databases
2. rebuild indexes
3. shrink databases
4. maintenance cleanup
5. history cleanup

Just make sure that the ReportServer database is included in steps 1 and 3. You can add it in by name or just select ‘all databases’ (as opposed to ‘all user databases’ which will leave it out).

The other thing that you must do is to set the recovery model of the database to ‘simple’. You can do this by right-clicking on the ReportServer database, selecting Properties then Options. You’ll find the drop-down for the recovery model at the top of the page.