Slow-growing SQL Server transaction log

Our MES system has a reasonably-sized transaction log; 9GB for a 3GB primary database. This is somewhat larger than normal recommendations (1.5x), but we import large volumes of batch data each morning which increases the number of transactions  and pushes up the size of the transaction log file. We don’t suffer noticeable performance degradation, nor are we approaching a disk space issue, but I like to be proactively attentive to our production systems.

At one time we had a 25GB transaction log file, which caused complications during upload of DB backups to our ISV for problem diagnosis with reproducible cases in production data. Even with a 25GB log we still did not suffer any internal problems. However, I prefer to remain closer to recommendations so I reigned in the transaction log size using a MP with alternating LOG and FULL backups. The file is not supposed to grow after this, but apparently “not supposed to grow” does not mean the same thing as “resizes the log file to the specified size” even after all the VLFs are marked as merged. When I run the MP/process manually I can shrink the logfile; however the automated MP always leaves the file at the same size, and occasionally bumps up the size slightly apparently due to a large number of transactions. (As of yet this remains as my unverified suspicion; I could check whether size increases correlate to large upload volume but I have not yet performed such an analysis.)

To summarize, I have a slow-growing transaction log that, while the growth is not a threat, is failing to resize to the specified value. My concern is whether A) our processing is so out-of-norm that the standard recommendations do not apply, B) my MP is not set up correctly, or C) SQL Server is not performing as advertised. (We do not use Enterprise edition, so I am already aware of a few weaknesses in the product– e.g. the inability to reorg indexes online, although when we reorg it doesn’t seem to take the database or tables offline. /shrug.) I suspect our process patterns are outside of the norm, but verifying this is not an easy task. The links below look helpful:

http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/29829/why-does-the-transaction-log-keep-growing-or-run-out-of-space

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/category/transaction-log/

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http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1178/monitoring-sql-server-database-transaction-log-space/

http://mattvelic.com/fixing-log-and-vlfs/

http://www.brentozar.com/blitz/high-virtual-log-file-vlf-count/

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/the-accidental-dba-day-30-of-30-troubleshooting-transaction-log-growth/

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