title: Legitimate uses of DUMP TRAN
body: <p>I recently had to root out the cause of intermittent ODBC errors in a 12 year old SQL Based application.  The culprit turned out to be this statement at the end of one of the stored procedures:</p>
  
  <pre><code>DUMP TRAN NotTheRealDBName WITH NO_LOG
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I wasn't familiar with this command, so I did some research and found that it makes a backup of the transaction log.  I believe this would only be useful if you at some point restored the transaction log, which didn't seem to be happening.  The stored procedure in question was a simple sequence of inserts, updates, selects, and deletes on various tables.</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to imagine why one would want to backup and restore the transaction log in the middle of business logic, but I can't get my mind around it.  Can anyone give me an example of an efficacious use of DUMP TRAN?</p>