So my last senior systems administrator decided to install solarwinds on a virtual machine as a standalone package (solarwinds, licensing, sql express). He came to me a day or two later saying that he needed to migrate the database from SQL express to our production SQL server as the instance was at the maximum allowed by SQL Express. He said it was eating up almost 20GB of space – which means he filled up the first database and created a secondary and then filled that one up too (SQL Express has a 10GB per database limit).

After being unable to migrate the database from Express to Standard for 2 days, he just starts it over on the production SQL instance. Long story short we were chewing through about 18GB of database disk space every day. The admin had, for some reason, enabled syslog with Debugging on all network equipment. Damn.

So I needed to delete about 180GB worth of syslogs and, knowing my previous experiences between delete and truncate, decided to just drop the entire table:

Truncate all syslog:
Open SQL Studio Manager
Run a new query
Truncate Table Syslog

Delete Old Syslogs:
Open SQL Studio Manager
Delete from Syslog Where datetime <= '4/24/2016'