Here’s another quirk for SharePoint Admins & Designers out there. If you ever come across something like “soap:ServerServer was unable to process request” while trying to work with pages in SharePoint Designer, congratulations! Now you can also be a part time DBA. Here’s a description of the problem:
While working with custom SharePoint pages in SharePoint Designer, I would occasionally get an error preventing me from opening the page to edit. The error would say “soap:ServerServer was unable to process request” along with some other not very helpful messages like you need FrontPage Extensions installed and to contact your Administrator. I thought this was just a glitch so I kept opening the file until it actually opened. And this worked for quite a while. But then the last couple of days I couldn’t get the custom page opened no matter how many times I tried. Off to the SharePoint Community I go…
Luckily someone else was having the same exact issue recently and was able to help out with some clues. I’m nowhere near a DBA, and still don’t understand how transaction log files work fully but I was at my wits end so I tried the suggested solutions. My log file was over 50GB’s by the way. So first I tried to shrink the SharePoint_Config Log file using the following SQL Query:
USE SharePoint_Config
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE (SharePoint_Config_Log, EMPTYFILE)
GO
No good, I get another wonderful error saying that I can not shrink the log file because it’s still in use. Off to the SQL Groups …… Sweet! So now I get to try a different SQL script (In addition to and before the one above):
BACKUP LOG SharePoint_Config WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
*Checking the Log file size*
Awesome! Now it’s only 500kb.
*Opening the custom page in SharePoint Designer*
Gnarly! Opens no problem. And now I get to go back to doing UI stuff. 
So in summary, here are the SQL scripts you need to do to reduce the size of your transaction log files:
BACKUP LOG SharePoint_Config WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
USE SharePoint_Config
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE (SharePoint_Config_Log, EMPTYFILE)
GO
If you know of any pitfalls of doing this feel free to leave us some comments!
