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Category: Bugs

Categorizing Why Bugs Can Be Tricky

Published 2021-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Julia Evans has a list:

Hello! I’m very slowly working on writing a zine about debugging, so I asked on Twitter the other day:

If you’ve run into a bug where it felt “impossible” to understand what was happening – what made it feel that way?

Of course, bugs always happen for logical reasons, but I’ve definitely run into bugs that felt like they might be impossible for me to understand (until I figured them out!)

I got about 400 responses, which I’ll try to summarize here. I’m not going to talk about how to deal with these various kinds of “impossible” bugs in this post, I’ll just try to classify them.

Click through for the major categories, as well as explanations and sub-categories. I think an interesting follow-up to this is to ask why we find ourselves in situations where we get these sorts of bugs and what (if anything) we can do to minimize or eliminate the likelihood of their appearance.

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Bug with Filtered Index on Computed Column

Published 2021-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling points out a weird bug:

At some point in the past, I blogged about a silent bug with computed columns and clustered column store indexes.

In this post, I’m going to take a quick look at a very loud bug.

Normally, you can’t add a filtered index to a computed column. I’ve always hated that limitation. How nice would that be for so many currently difficult tasks?

Click through to see how you can create a filtered index against a computed column, as well as all of the pain it provides.

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Recursive UDF Bug in SQL Server 2019

Published 2021-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling finds the bugs so you don’t have to:

I see people do things like this fairly often with UDFs. I don’t know why. It’s almost like they read a list of best practices and decided the opposite was better.

This is a quite simplified function, but it’s enough to show the bug behavior.

While writing this, I learned that you can’t create a recursive (self-referencing) scalar UDF with the schemabinding option. I don’t know why that is either.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you run into this bug, it’s your own fault.

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sample_ms in sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats and Data Types

Published 2021-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal points out an interesting bug:

A prior student emailed me yesterday about some strange behavior of the sample_ms column in sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats. It’s supposed to be the number of milliseconds since the SQL Server instance has been started. He has a SQL Server 2016 instance that’s been running since August 2019, and it shows the following:

– ms_ticks from sys.dm_os_sys_info: 51915112684 (which works out to be August 28, 2019)

– sample_ms from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats: 375504432 (which works out to be about 4.5 days)

Read on to get a determination and an alternative in case you’re using that field.

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Bug around Parallel Eager Spools and Batch Mode

Published 2021-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White digs into a nasty bug:

A more accurate description of the issue would be:

This bug can cause wrong results, incorrect error messages, and statement failure when:

– A data-modification statement requires Halloween Protection.
– That protection is provided by a Parallel Eager Spool.
– The spool is on the probe side of a Batch Mode Hash Join.

This issue affects Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2014 to 2019 inclusive.

Read on for a repro and Paul’s thoughts. As of March 2021, this is an active problem, so it’s worth keeping an eye on in your environment. I’d wager, though, that this probably doesn’t pop up on its own very frequently.

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Hyperscale and RBIO_RG_STORAGE

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens runs into a strange bug in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale:

This single wait made sure our complete environment went dead in the water. Everything halted. To get some context, Microsoft has some documentation on this wait:

Occurs when a Hyperscale database primary compute node log generation rate is being throttled due to delayed log consumption at the page server(s).

Well, that’s not really helping, because that’s about everything they tell you about it.

Click through for Reitse’s findings and Microsoft’s advice.

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Windows Drive Corruption Bug

Published 2021-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Ax Sharma reports on a nasty bug in Windows:

In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed.

When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records.

The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version.

Read the whole thing. It looks like this also affects Windows XP, which makes me figure it might affect Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 too. H/T Mark Wilkinson.

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Issues Deploying Azure Synapse Analytics via ARM Template

Published 2020-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew hits on some growing pains:

Just last week we heard the announcement from Microsoft that Azure Synapse Analytics is now generally available (GA)… A full year on, plus a few weeks, since first seeing Synapse at the big USA conferences in November 2019.

Today I’ve been attempting to use the resource with a view to implementing it for several customer projects. Although GA, it would seem that many part of the technology are far from ready.

In this brief blog I’m exposing some of the pain I’ve faced so far in simply trying to deploy a second instance of Azure Synapse Analytics using ARM templates.

Click through for three that Paul found. I’d expect that most of these will be tidied up in the next few months.

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Working Around an SSMS Extended Events Bug

Published 2020-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo finds a bug:

1. Open the “New Session…” GUI for extended events in SSMS
2. Give it a name, it’s not important
3. Add an event with a Duration Field, I’ve added sp_statement_completed and configure it to be higher than an arbitrary value

And then watch it go boom in SSMS 18.7. Click through for a demo of the issue and a workaround.

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