Today’s (SQL) Tip…
This is a common issue I run into on a near daily basis. You have a very large table and you notice your performance is degrading, the next step is to rebuild your indexes to make sure they are not fragmented. After letting the rebuild operation run for a while the transaction throws a 40552 error.
So what just happened? Your index is too big to be rebuilt within SQL Azure as per this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn338081.aspx#TransactionLogLimit. The only way around it is to split your table into smaller pieces that can be rebuilt within the 2 GB of transaction log allotted.