Hourly Transaction Log files size not consistent - is this Differential backup file?

Question

I am new to DBA task here.

I am trying to restore database with transactional logs (in SQB file format) that our company get 24 times each hour daily thru FTP site, and then I have to convert them to BAK file format using "RedGate's SQL Backup" application.

Then, I am planning to restore each transactional log with "NoRecovery" as we would have to restore each hour.

I found there is a pattern of file number "..04" which is really big compared to other hourly transactional logs.

I did not get specific instruction regards to this file "..04" from the vendor's documentation who provides data.

I am curious whether I should treat this particular file as a regular transactional log or is this like "differential backup file" that I have treat it differently?

Answer 1

It's more likely that the log backup occurs after some processes that generate a lot of log records, like index maintenance or any ETL-ish tasks.

You may find some benefit in increasing the frequency of your log backups to every 5-15 minutes so that internal truncation occurs more frequently, since that will likely make the backup size smaller.