title: There must be a way to delete data in SQL Server w/o overloading the log
body: <p>I need to delete a bunch of data, and don't have the disk space for the log to continue growing.  Upon looking into the matter further, it looks like there isn't any way around this, but I thought I'd ask for sure; it's difficult for me to believe that something so simple is impossible.</p>
  
  <p>I tried looping, deleting in chunks, and calling shrinkfile on the log after each iteration.  SQL Server just seems to ignore the shrinkfile command.  Did the same with backup log (then deleting the backup file afterwards).  Same thing - log just keeps on growing.  The recovery model on the database I'm trying this on is simple - I thought that would make it easier, but it doesn't.</p>