Under the full recovery model, all bulk operations are fully logged. However, you can minimize logging for a set of bulk operations by switching the database to the bulk-logged recovery model temporarily for bulk operations. Minimal logging is more efficient than full logging, and it reduces the possibility of a large-scale bulk operation filling the available transaction log space during a bulk transaction. However, if the database is damaged or lost when minimal logging is in effect, you cannot recover the database to the point of failure.

If the table has no indexes, data pages are minimally logged.

If the table has no clustered index but has one or more nonclustered indexes, data pages are always minimally logged. How index pages are logged, however, depends on whether the table is empty:

If the table is empty, index pages are minimally logged. If you start with an empty table and bulk import the data in multiple batches, both index and data pages are minimally logged for the first batch, but beginning with the second batch, only data pages are minimally logged.

If table is non-empty, index pages are fully logged.