SQL Server large transaction log for simple recovery model? help! Hi all i'm building a data warehouse and noticed that my tran log is massive (in simple recovery).  MDF file is 2.6 GB.  LDF file is 7.8 GB!!! Why is this??? i don't want a stupid tran log that's why i've put in simple recovery!  (i know the system needs tran log).  so i tried to shrink the DB and get this error message.

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (&lt; DB &gt;)

DBCC SHRINKDATABASE: File ID 1 of database ID 5 was skipped because the file does not have enough free space to reclaim.
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE: File ID 2 of database ID 5 was skipped because the file does not have enough free space to reclaim.
DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.


have plenty of disk space!  ARGH should change my job title to professional sql wrestler...
For completeness, converting my comment to answer :

If the database is EMPTY, what is the initial size of the transaction log defined when the DB was created ?

If the initial size of the T-log is defined more than you need, then thats the problem. 

You should always carefully define the transaction logsize.