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Category: Bugs

The Halloween Problem

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains the Halloween Problem:

What is The Halloween Problem?
This is a bit more complicated. Let’s say you are trying to give a 10% raise to everyone who makes less than $25k.

Couple of quick notes here. This is a common example because this in fact the problem that exposed the issue. Also, while UPDATEs are probably the easiest way to explain what’s going on, it can affect any type of write.

So back to our update statement. There are several ways this could be implemented. I’m going to use pseudo T-SQL to demonstrate a couple and explain each.

This has certain implications as you can see in the linked Paul White series.  These implications typically mean slower performance (e.g., by forcing spooling) but getting rid of a potentially nasty problem.

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Stretch Database Authentication Failures

Published 2016-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Li walks through a bug in Stretch database:

The message provided enough directions.  It says either you have a bad login or firewall setting on the Azure DB Server side is not configured correctly.     The very first thing is to ensure the Firewall was configured correctly.   We even tried 0.0.0.0. to 255.255.255.255. But it didn’t resolve the issue.

Next we created a brand new database on the same server and tried on that one.  It worked.  But customer just couldn’t get the old database to work even she made sure that she could use the login/password to log in using SSM on the same server to the Azure DB server.

On the same server, brand new database worked but the old database didn’t.   So that made me wonder what happens if I manually cause an failure and later retry.

Read on for the repo and solution.

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Threads Need Memory Too

Published 2016-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal notices a bug with fn_dump_dblog():

Using this command creates more threads and hidden schedulers (these will only go after a restart). Depending on what version of SQL Server you are on and what Service Pack you may or may not have this issue. It was fixed in SQL 2012 SP2 onwards. So be on the cautious side when running these sorts of commands.

Also I noticed Memory bloat for the sqlservr.exe. Nothing else was running on this server, just my fn_dump_dblog script.  Threads need memory too.

It’s good advice.  Undocumented functions are probably more likely than documented functions to contain bugs.

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Emoji In SQL Server

Published 2016-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Janik wants to have a ninja cat riding a T-Rex for a database name:

There it is! The ninja cat database! You can see that even IntelliSense shows the ninja cat. Cool, right? How does it show in Object Explorer?

DOH! There’s obviously something strange going on here. Let’s validate the sys.databases table:

If full emoji support is the thing keeping you from moving to SQL Server, you might have to wait until the next version.

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