Category: Bugs

2 Weeks ago I was working in a very interesting case in SQL 2016. I received an email from one of my customers saying that they were having intermitent issues within their app that was executing some SP_Execute_External_script SP calls to the database.
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We also restarted the launchpad service but with no luck….. The biggest challenge was that sometimes the service responded fine and sometimes it showed the issue that I paste above (And this for me was absolutelly new…). From SQL Side we executed an extended events session with all R services counters but nothing appeared… From sys.dm_Exec_session_Wait_stats we just observed that the session was waiting for SATELLITE_SERVICE_SETUP wait which points that SQL Was waiting an answer from the R service itself.

Click through for the solution.

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Query Store & Spinlocks

Published 2018-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler ran into an issue with the Query Store process experiencing waits due to spinlocks:

We were enjoying a nice peaceful afternoon when we hear panicked shouting that a SQL Server had become unresponsive and the customers were unable to do anything.

We moseyed on down to the server in question to take a look at it. One thing stood out immediately, CPU was pegged out at 100% but SQL itself didn’t actually seem to be doing anything, transactions\second was on the floor. Unfortunately this happened a while back and I didn’t think to capture any graphs or metrics at the time so you’re just going to have to take my word for this.

The issue David ran into was subsequently fixed, making this a cautionary tale to keep those SQL Server instances patched.

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Tempdb Blocking With Non-Clustered Columnstore Indexes

Published 2018-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Ned Otter runs into a tricky issue:

I have a client that used Itzik Ben-Gan’s solution of creating a filtered nonclustered columnstore index to achieve batch mode on a rowstore (in fact I proposed that the client consider it). They have an OLTP system, and often perform YTD calculations. When they tested, processing time was reduced by 30 to 50 percent, without touching a single line of application code. If that ain’t low hanging fruit, I don’t know what is —

However, during testing, I noticed some intermittent blocking that didn’t make sense to me. But I couldn’t nail it down, and they went live with the “filtered nonclustered columnstore index” solution.

Once they deployed – and there was a lot of concurrency – I could see what had eluded me during my proof of concept: blocking in tempdb.

Read on for the repro and check out Ned’s UserVoice bug report.

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Thoughts On UTF-8 Encoding In SQL Server 2019

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky digs into UTF-8 support in SQL Server 2019 and has found a few bugs:

Let’s start with what we are told about this new feature. According to the documentation, the new UTF-8 Collations:

can be used …
1. as a database-level default Collation
2. as a column-level Collation
3. by appending “_UTF8” to the end of any Supplementary Character-Aware Collation (i.e. either having “_SC” in their name, or being of level 140 or newer)
4. with only the CHAR and VARCHAR
(implied) have no effect on NCHAR and NVARCHAR data (meaning: for these types, the UTF-8 Collations behave the same as their non-UTF-8 equivalents
“This feature may provide significant storage savings, depending on the character set in use.” (emphasis mine)

Solomon takes his normal, thorough approach to the problem and finds several issues.

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Issues With Bulk Inserting Multi-Byte Characters In Fixed Width Files

Published 2018-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West shares an example of an issue with BULK INSERT:

Fellow Canadian Doran Douglas brought this issue to my attention recently, and I wanted to share it with you as well.

Let’s say you have a file in UTF-8 format. What this means is that some of the characters will be single-byte, and some may be more than that.

Where this becomes problematic is that a fixed-width file has fields that are, well, fixed in size. If a Unicode character requires more than one byte, it’s going to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of truncation.

Click through for an example. This seems like a bug to me—I interpret fixed-width as fixed number of characters, not fixed number of bytes. At the very least, it’s liable to cause confusion.

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Read Event Stream Function Missing When Viewing Extended Events File

Published 2018-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Tibor Karaszi points out an annoying bug which can happen when viewing an Extended Events file:

Here’s the relevant text in the message box, to facilitate searching:

The storage failed to initialize using the provided parameters. (Microsoft.SqlServer.XEventStorage)

Cannot view the function ‘fn_MSXe_read_event_stream’, because it does not exist or you do not have permission. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15151)

Read on for the solution, and if you’re interested in changing that behavior, vote up the UserVoice submission.

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Bug In July Windows Updates Causing “TCP port is already in use” Errors

Published 2018-07-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jordon Riel warns us about a recent Windows update which can cause SQL Server’s database engine to fail to start up:

We have recently become aware of a regression in one of the TCP/IP functions that manages the TCP port pool which was introduced in the July 10, 2018 Windows updates for Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 and Windows 8.1/Server 2012 R2.

This regression may cause the restart of the SQL Server service to fail with the error, “TCP port is already in use”. We have also observed this issue preventing Availability Group listeners from coming online during failover events for both planned and/or unexpected failovers. When this occurs, you may observe errors similar to below in the SQL ERRORLOGs:

Error: 26023, Severity: 16, State: 1.
Server TCP provider failed to listen on [ <IP ADDRESS> <ipv4> <PORT>]. Tcp port is already in use.
Error: 17182, Severity: 16, State: 1.
TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x2740, status code 0xa. Reason: Unable to initialize the TCP/IP listener. Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
Error: 17182, Severity: 16, State: 1.
TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x2740, status code 0x1. Reason: Initialization failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.
Error: 17826, Severity: 18, State: 3.
Could not start the network library because of an internal error in the network library. To determine the cause, review the errors immediately preceding this one in the error log.
Error: 17120, Severity: 16, State: 1.
SQL Server could not spawn FRunCommunicationsManager thread. Check the SQL Server error log and the Windows event logs for information about possible related problems.

Read on for the solution.

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SSAS Tabular Deployment Fails: Newtonsoft.Json Missing

Published 2018-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Whittles walks us through an error deploying a SQL Server Analysis Services tabular model:

Deploying an Analysis Services Tabular model to SSAS Azure using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. Both Visual Studio 2017 & SQL Server 2017 installed on the client.

Try and click on the ellipses to change the data source connection string or impersonation information results in a Newtonsoft.json error:

“Could not load file or assembly ‘Newtonsoft.Json, Version 6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, ……”

As I like to joke, every single .NET project in existence includes Newtonsoft.Json. As Alex shows, sometimes they don’t reference the right version.

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Diagnosing A SQL Server Error Using WinDbg

Published 2018-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Dmitry Pilugin gives us a specific example of using WinDbg to track down a bug in SQL Server:

The important part is that the same stack with the same relative to a module addresses was in all the dumps.

To get an idea of what is going on, we may try to convert the relative address: Module(<sqlmodule>+hex), into a SQL Server’s method name. Probably the method’s name would be descriptive enough to give some information. This is the moment where WinDbg with public symbols may help.

You may download WinDbg from the here, and then download public symbols, you may use WinDbg documentation or here is an example of how to do it from Paul Randal, adopt it to your folders and version.

You should not debug a production server, because WinDbg will break any singe instruction execution, so make sure you have a test server with the exact same SQL Server version as production (in my case it was 13.0.4474.0).

I heartily second the comment that you never want to run the debugger in production.

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Problem With Merge Replication And FILESTREAM

Published 2018-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori walks us through an error when combining merge replication with FILESTREAM:

I published tables with FILESTREAM data before, but it seems like there is a particular planetary alignment that triggers an error during the execution of the snapshot agent.

This unlikely combination consists in a merge article with a FILESTREAM column and two UNIQUE indexes on the ROWGUIDCOL column. Yes, I know that generally it does not make sense to have two indexes on the same column, but this happened to be one of the cases where it did, so we had a CLUSTERED PRIMARY KEY on the uniqueidentifier column decorated with the ROWGUIDCOL attribute and, on top, one more NONCLUSTERED UNIQUE index on the same column, backed by a UNIQUE constraint.

Setting up the publication does not throw any error, but generating the initial snapshot for the publication does:

Cannot create, drop, enable, or disable more than one constraint,
column, index, or trigger named 'ncMSmerge_conflict_TestMergeRep_DataStream'
in this context. Duplicate names are not allowed.

This is a rather specific confluence of events, so it probably won’t affect many people. Still, it is a bug.

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