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Category: Error Handling

Forced Quorum Failures with WSFC

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin can’t reach quorum:

The incident started with a late-night phone call from one of our customers (it’s always a late-night phone call, isn’t it?).

They reported that during a DR exercise on their production environment (Chaos Engineering, anyone?) their entire cluster failed and they weren’t able to bring any of the replicas back online.

Click through for the full story, including what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent similar problems in the future.

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Finally Blocks and Error Handling in Data Factory

Published 2024-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Chen Hirsh doesn’t let failure get in the way of doing work:

Today I stumbled upon a weird behavior in Azure Data Factory (ADF) error handling.

ADF lets us add error handling in the flow control, In this example, I’m trying to copy some data, and if that fails go to on failure branch (red line). If the activity succeeded, go to on success branch (green line)

These work great (If you can call a failure great…).

Let’s take another step. What if I want to run another activity at the end, no matter if the copy succeeded or failed?

The behavior is a bit weird, as it doesn’t work quite the way you’d expect. Chen, however, shows us how to do it.

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Function App Caching of Key Vault Secrets

Published 2024-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck runs into an odd issue:

In the PowerShell function, this application setting is retrieved as an environment variable so it can authenticate with the Graph API using the app registation. So far so good, except that the secret of this app registration expires after 1 year (some time ago you could configure an expiration date for in the future, but it seems this isn’t possible anymore). The Azure Function started crashing with a 401 (Unauthorized) error.

Read on to see what Koen tried, what eventually fixed it, and a pair of updates to the post.

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SQL Server Setup Config Files and Per-Version Maintenance

Published 2024-02-02 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand diagnoses a problem:

We came across a new error during SQL Server setup that returned zero useful search results:

The setting ‘COMMFABRICPORT’ specified is not recognized.

I did not find too many mentions of this argument at all, never mind in that specific phrase – though now that I wrote this, it might start returning this post. Most mentions came from probably a single sample copy of ConfigurationFile.ini offered on a blog post from the ~2017 timeframe.

Read on to learn more about this, as well as short-term and long-term fixes for managing your installation config files.

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Fixing the Power BI Error “Something Is Wrong with One or More Fields”

Published 2024-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler broke it and now needs to buy it:

The “grey box of death” in Power BI is unfortunately a common sight for anyone creating reports. When you see this grey error box, it means that the visual can’t obtain a valid result. If that error says “Something is wrong with one or more fields”, then there’s several possible reasons for this:

Click through for those reasons, as well as how to fix the problem. Kurt shows this both in video form and written out, so check it out.

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Stack Overflows in Power Query

Published 2024-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits an error:

If you’re writing your own M code in Power Query in Power BI or Excel you may run into the following error:

Expression.Error: Evaluation resulted in a stack overflow and cannot continue.

If you’re a programmer you probably know what a stack overflow is; if you’re not you might search for the term, find this Wikipedia article and still have no clue what has happened. Either way it may still be difficult to understand why you’re running into it in Power Query. To explain let’s see some examples.

Read on to learn what a stack overflow is, how you can create one, and circumstances in which one might arise in Power Query and M. Now Chris has me thinking about tail call recursion this early in the morning.

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NEXT VALUE FOR and ROWCOUNT

Published 2024-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz diagnoses a problem:

In the realm of SQL Server, certain combinations of commands and functions can lead to unexpected conflicts and errors. A notable example is the conflict between the NEXT VALUE FOR function and the ROWCOUNT setting. This article aims to dissect the nature of this error, explaining why it occurs, its implications, and how to effectively capture and analyze it using Extended Events in Azure SQL Database. For example, we got the following error message: Msg 11739, Level 15, State 1, Line 11 – NEXT VALUE FOR function cannot be used if ROWCOUNT option has been set, or the query contains TOP or OFFSET. – NEXT VALUE FOR (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

Read on for more information, including what the error is telling us and how we can capture cases of that error using extended events.

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Merge Replication: Publisher Failed to Allocate a New Set of Identity Ranges

Published 2024-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Taiyeb Zakir brings back bad memories for me:

Message: The Publisher failed to allocate a new set of identity ranges for the subscription. This can occur when a Publisher or a republishing Subscriber has run out of identity ranges to allocate to its own Subscribers or when an identity column data type does not support an additional identity range allocation. If a republishing Subscriber has run out of identity ranges, synchronize the republishing Subscriber to obtain more identity ranges before restarting the synchronization. If a Publisher runs out of identit

Click through for one solution. I’ve seen the error pop up in other cases where the column was already a bigint or the ranges were nowhere near the max and have had to mess around with range values to get things working again. My simple advice with merge replication and identity integers is to include something in addition to the identity column that guarantees uniqueness–for example, ID plus a column for subscriber name, if that makes sense in your situation–and don’t auto-assign ranges. Yeah, you may end up with five rows with ID = 1, but it doesn’t matter because there’s something making that row unique.

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Troubleshooting the Automation of a Process

Published 2023-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens tells a tale of woe:

When I got the job to restore a bacpac file, I didn’t think much of it. Because it’s quite easy. Get the bacpac and restore it with Azure Data Studio or Sql Server Management Studio. Get coffee, done. Then I got these requirements:

  • The bacpac needs to be downloaded daily from an sFTP server, without certificate
  • The bacpac file is in a zip file
  • The zip file is password protected
  • Everything must be done serverless (Azure Automation, Logic App, Function App, Data Factory and/or Synapse Analytics)
  • It’s a daily process that needs to be done without human supervision

Welcome to cloud development: Part A is easy, Part B is easy, Part C is mildly challenging, and combining A with B and C is a total nightmare because it turns out that A and B aren’t compatible, so by the end, you’re dealing with A” and b and D (because C, C’, C”, etc. wouldn’t work and c and c’ would work but had severe limitations preventing you from using it in this scenario).

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