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Category: Error Handling

Oracle: RMAN and Non-Synchronizing Standby Database

Published 2023-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

David Fitzjarrell proffers advice on recovering from a non-synchronizing standby database:

Occasionally the unthinkable can occur and the DBA can be left with a standby database that is no longer synchronizing with the primary. A plethora of “advice”will soon follow that discovery, most of it much like this:

“Well, ya gotta rebuild it.”

Of course the question to ask is “how far out of synch is the standby>” That question is key in determining how to attack this situation. Let’s go through the two most common occurrences of this and see how to address them.

Read on to see David’s advice.

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Finding SSAS Tabular Dimensions in Excel

Published 2023-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt has lost a few dimensions in the couch cushions:

A colleague reached out last week while connecting to one of our SQL Server Analysis Services models in Excel. He couldn’t find the expected Attribute folders in the model. He was looking for the following dimensions:

Of particular interest was that this colleague could not see them but Olivier could. The answer ends up being a bit surprising.

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Azure Blob Storage Operating System Error 86

Published 2023-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz 86’d that option:

Today, I worked on a service request that our customer got the following error message: Cannot open backup device ‘https://XXX.blob.core.windows.net/NNN/YYY.bak‘. Operating system error 86(The specified network password is not correct.). RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201). Following I would like to share with you some details why this issue and the activities done to resolve it. 

Read on to get a better understanding of what this error actually means and how you can fix it.

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Error Trapping with Extended Events

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan wants to know what’s going wrong:

Many times, when I’m using Extended Events, I’m filtering on an Id or procedure name in query text and tracking what’s hitting a database. In these cases, I’m assuming queries are going to complete successfully. Did you know Extended Events can be useful when you’re expecting things to go wrong? Let’s look at how we can use Extended Events to track down error messages.

You’ll get a fair amount of noise on a busy server–especially dev servers where people are writing queries and trying things out—but this is a great technique for seeing if something has gone wrong and we need to look into it before a customer reaches out.

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TINYINT Casts in Spark SQL vs T-SQL

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows runs into an interesting oddity:

Yet another thing that has bitten me working in SparkSQL in Databricks—this time it’s data types.

In SQL Server, a tinyint ranges from 0 to 255 but both of them allow for 256 total values. If you attempt to cast a value that doesn’t fit in that range, you’re going to raise an error.

SQL Server’s TINYINT data type is an unsigned one-byte number, whereas TINYINT in Spark SQL is a signed one-byte number. But that’s not the biggest difference Bill finds, so check out the post to learn more.

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Troubleshooting a Downed SQL Server

Published 2023-09-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill takes us through an issue:

This is a stand-alone bare metal server located at a hosting facility with some local storage as well as NAS storage.  SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition, 8 cores, 128GB RAM.  The primary database is nearing 1TB and is has multiple filegroups (Active, Archive, Indexes, etc.).   This database and apps that touch it ARE the company.

Read on for Kevin’s process, which was a solid bit of troubleshooting.

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Australian Azure Downtime After-Action Report

Published 2023-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some thoughts:

Note that 11:34, the decision was made to shut down infrastructure without Microsoft failing your databases over elsewhere. If you were an Azure SQL DB or Cosmos DB user, and you weren’t paying for replicas in another data center, it was up to you to follow Microsoft’s disaster recovery guidance.

Controversial opinion: I actually love that and I think it’s great.

That is definitely a controversial opinion, but it’s also one I agree with. Read on for more of Brent’s thoughts.

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STRING_SPLIT Not a Recognized Built-In Function Name

Published 2023-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little resolves an error:

Yesterday, I was writing some Transact SQL to dust off the cobwebs. I got confused when I was playing around with the STRING_SPLIT function, and kept getting the error:

Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 2 ‘STRING_SPLIT’ is not a recognized built-in function name.

When I saw this, I immediately thought compatibility level, as that’s something I’ve run into several times before. In this case, it turns out that the correct answer was something else.

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Executing Transactions in PostgreSQL

Published 2023-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Salman Ahmed rolls it back:

Transactions, like any other database, are a key component of PostgreSQL. A transaction is a sequence of one or more database operations that are executed as a single unit of work. These operations can be queries (e.g. SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE) that modify the database’s state.

A transaction’s main purpose is to combine multiple statements into an atomic, all-or-nothing process. It ensures that either all operations within a transaction are fully completed, or none of them are executed at all. Concurrent transactions cannot see each other’s unfinished changes. Updates from ongoing transactions remain hidden until completion, at which point all changes become visible simultaneously.

This is very similar to SQL Server, except their savepoints actually work they way they’re supposed to.

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CREATE OR ALTER and sp_ Procedures

Published 2023-08-28 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson hits an edge case:

It isn’t that such objects are to be completely avoided, it is that they are ONLY to be used when you need the special qualities. Ola Hallengren’s backup solution creates a dbo.sp_BackupServer procedure so you can run the backup command from any database.

But if you don’t need the special properties of the sp_procedure, they are bad for the reasons Aaron stated, the reason I stumbled upon today being just a special subset. In this case CREATE OR ALTER behaves differently than CREATE in a way that was really confusing to me as I was working on a piece of code today.

Read on for Louis’s tale of woe and confusion, but mostly confusion.

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