Error Handling – Curated SQL

Power BI Maximum Allowable Memory Allocation Error

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series from a few years ago:

This is a very late addition to the series of posts I wrote back in 2024 and which started here on Power BI memory errors. It’s about a very rare error that is hard to deal with and often temporary but since people do run into it from time to time I decided to write about it so there is some useful information available about it online.

The error, which can occur when you refresh a semantic model or render a report, has two associated error messages:

Click through to see those two error messages, as well as a simplified version of the root cause and what you can do.

MSG 10054 Failures over VPN

Published 2026-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Radney takes us through a connection failure error:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by multiple customers experiencing the same frustrating issue. Applications and SSMS sessions that had been rock-solid for years suddenly started throwing errors when connecting over VPN:

Msg 10054: “An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.”

“Connection Failure (status code = 3000, [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server] The connection is broken and recovery is not possible…”

Read on to learn what’s going on and how you can remediate it.

Refresh Warnings now Available in Power BI History

Published 2026-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb tells us don’t panic:

Since March 2026, Power BI semantic models have started showing warnings in their Refresh History in the Service. This has scared a few people but in fact all that is happening is that errors which were there all along and which don’t prevent refreshes from completing are now being flagged. Documentation on this feature can be found here but let’s see an example of the type of errors that can cause these warnings.

Click through for that example.

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When Fabric Mirroring Doesn’t Copy Rows

Published 2026-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck troubleshoots an issue:

A short blog post about an issue with Fabric Mirroring (with Azure SQL DB as the source) that I’ve managed to run into, twice. I’ve set up mirroring by creating a connection using a service principal and this principal has the proper permissions on the source database. Configuring the replication was without issues, and the replication status went from “starting” to “running”. However, no rows were being copied. The tables were all listed in the monitoring pane, but the counters of “rows replicated” remained at zero. There were no errors in the logs (in OneLake) and nothing suspicious was mentioned in the monitoring.

This was a rather pernicious issue. Based on Koen’s explanation, it sounds like there’s no way to know what the actual problem was.

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Diagnosing a Database in Recovery Pending State

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci tells a story:

After receiving the alert, I verified that there were multiple databases on the same instance that were in the “Recovery Pending” state. A review of the SQL Server error log showed that the folder on the L drive was inaccessible, so transaction log files could not be read.

Click through for the troubleshooting steps leading to a happy ending.

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Explaining Non-Yielding Schedulers during Backups

Published 2026-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy provides an explanation:

Sparked by my friends at Straight Path SQL, we’re going to look at a rare cause of non-yielding scheduler dumps. This is another one of those items that I meant to write about a long time ago when I worked in Support and then, well, I suck and clearly forgot about it. This should give you an idea of how rare this specific issue hits.

Read on to see what might cause this scenario and why you’re likely never to see it in the wild.

Though now that I’ve typed it, I’m sure someone will take that as a challenge.

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Finding Missing Data-Driven Subscriptions after an SSRS Upgrade

Published 2026-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Sandra Delany has misplaced some subscriptions:

After migrating SSRS from SQL 2016 Enterprise Edition to SSRS SQL 2022 Standard Edition Data-driven subscriptions disappeared from within the SSRS web portal. However, I could see the subscriptions in the ReportServer.dbo.Subscriptions table.

SSRS was migrated from an EC2 instance where SQL and SSRS, etc. was installed by a DBA to an EC2 instance that was built using a template where all components were installed. When this was originally built out, we asked that they test. They said they did some testing, but they did not look at subscriptions in the portal nor did they create a subscription.

Click through to see how Sandra was able to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. But then how that led to the next issue, and how Sandra resolved that. And so on. This is what I refer to as an IT shaggy dog story. I don’t mean it in a negative sense for Sandra (or any author) but more along the lines of, “I want to solve problem X, which should take about 5-10 minutes. As I start to solve problem X, I now need to solve problem Y to solve X. But as I start to solve Y, now I need to fix Z. Oh, and then here come problems A, B, and C to make my life a pain. Three days later, I finally got X done.” It seems like the life of your average IT professional is one shaggy dog story after another.

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Troubleshooting a Vanishing CU Install

Published 2026-03-16 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy digs into an issue:

Someone asked if I’ve ever had a CU install where you run it and it goes through the extraction process, then right as it hits 100% just exists and nothing happens. Well, that’s pretty weird, and no, I hadn’t. I was, however, intrigued! Since I love my readers, I made a repro of what the person this was occurring to, saw.

Click through for the expectations and what it actually turned out to be.

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Eventstream Not Sending Data to KQL Database after Resuming Fabric Capacity

Published 2026-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an issue:

To continue the development of my mobile app, whose core ability is to scan barcodes of consumable articles and send them over for analytics, I’m resuming my capacity, starting to scan barcodes again, sending them to my Eventstream, and finally saving them in my KQL database.

After a couple of minutes, I wanted to validate all the scanned results in my KQL database and navigate to my scanned_barcode table.

Read on to see how Olivier diagnosed and corrected the problem.

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Troubleshooting Bad Request in ADF Pipelines

Published 2026-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck said something bad:

A while ago I blogged about a use case where a pipeline fails during debugging with a BadRequest error, even though it validates successfully. If you’re wondering, this is the helpful error message that you get:

Click through for an image of the 400 Bad Request message, how Koen fixed it originally, and then a different scenario in which that 400 message popped up.

Ultimately, a 400 Bad Request comes down to “You sent me information that doesn’t make sense and I can’t fulfill your request, so fix it, dummy.” 400 status codes are very rude and insulting. Especially 418–that thing has a mouth like a sailor’s.

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Category: Error Handling