Thomas Rushton has a script for us:
Why Script This? What’s Wrong With SSMS’s GUI?
Well, although SSMS does allow you to look at the error logs, it’s not very helpful for filtering – you can only filter for items that match, rather than exclude items. There are a few other filters as well – I guess the whole thing is just a wrapper around xp_readerrorlog below…
But Thomas has a better way for us.
Kenneth Fisher shows how you can build your own custom SQL Server error messages:
I’m sure lots of you have used the function RAISERROR to handle an error caused by your code. The problem is, what do you do if the error you want to display isn’t one that Microsoft choose to include in the list of errors? (sys.messages)
You have two options.
Read on for those options.
This blog post is about a situation that initially perplexed me – I was installing SQL Server 2017 onto a new DEMO machine – running Windows Server 2019. This install is one I have done over 50 times, if not more.
Halfway through I got an interesting error that (1) I’ve never seen before and (2) did not expect post SQL Server 2014.
MSI Error: 1706 An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘sqlncli.msi’.
Read on for the solution. And note that it also happens with Visual Studio 2017.
Shane O’Neill takes us through some of the error-handling dynamics available in dbatools:
PowerShell errors normally contain useful information on what went wrong. With this information, the “what went wrong” can be fixed.
That being said, if you are writing PowerShell scripts and not raising valid error messages then I highly advise you to go back and fix that.
dbatools raises these error messages as friendly warning messages since we’ve found people will read a warning message quicker than they will read an error message.
There are several options available for you to handle errors, including viewing them as warnings, viewing as errors, and populating error text in variables.
Bert Wagner takes us through a troublesome table design:
This table stores data for an application that has many different types of Pages. Each Page stores different types of data, but instead of creating a separate table for each type, we store all the different data in the varchar
DataValuecolumn and maintain the original data type in theDataTypecolumn.This structure reduces the complexity required for maintaining our database (compared to creating possibly hundreds of tables, one for each PageName) and makes querying easier (only need to query one table). However, this design could also lead to some unexpected query results.
This is your daily reminder that an attribute should be a thing which describes an entity, not one of multiple things.
Joe Obbish has moved into Erik Darling’s Internet Basement and has a doozy of a first post there:
I need to find a relatively efficient way to advance the CSILOCATOR because I need to do it over 2 billion times, if my theory is correct about the maximum allowed value. Both updating all of the rows in a delta rowgroup and deleting and reinserting advance the CSILOCATOR. I expected that small batch sizes would work best, and they did. For my table’s schema, the sweet spot for updates is about 275 rows and the sweet spot for delete/inserts is about 550 rows. Delete/inserts appeared to be faster than updates for the purpose of constantly reloading the same rows over and over.
Great post, Brent!
The other day, I was <sarcasm>blessed / honored / delighted</sarcasm> to waste several hours attempting to install SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.5 over and over again. Each time it would get through the first several steps of the installation process, but then encounter some condition causing it to rollback and finally end with the <sarcasm>super helpful</sarcasm> error message of:
An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail.
Use the following information to resolve the error, and then try the setup process again.That might have been ok had there actually been any information that followed. But no, there was none, not even a small piece of unhelpful information.
Solomon takes us through the blow-by-blow accounting as well as a quick rundown of the solution.
Imke Feldmann takes us through a workaround for an interesting error:
When running R-scripts in Power BI, I got all sorts of error-messages who all had one thing in common: They were complaining about one or more packages being installed by an R version with different internals.
Click through for the solution. I’m not sure I’ve run into this issue before and I’d rather keep it that way.
RJ Zaworski gives us examples of the types of problems you can run into with distributed systems:
Time limits: ending the neverending
Here’s one to ponder: how long can a long-running action go on before the customer (even a very patient, very digital customer) loses all interest in the outcome?
Pull up a chair. With no upper bound, we could be here a while.
Read on for more in that vein with JavaScript-y solutions.
Eugene Meidinger walks us through an error message in DAX:
Sometimes, when working with DAX, you might get the following error:
The expression refers to multiple columns. Multiple columns cannot be converted to a scalar value.This error occurs whenever the DAX engine was expecting a single value, or scalar, and instead received a table of values instead. This is an easy error to make because many DAX functions, such as FILTER, SUMMARIZE and ALL, return table values.
Eugene lays out when each scenario occurs, so check it out.
Kevin Feasel
2019-08-19
Error Handling, T-SQL
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