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Category: Error Handling

Debugging SQLPackage Issues in Powershell

Published 2023-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz simplifies SQLPackage output:

Handling massive SQLPackage diagnostic logs, like those spanning over 4 million rows, can be an overwhelming task when troubleshooting support cases. This article introduces a PowerShell script designed to efficiently parse through SQLPackage diagnostic logs, extract error messages, and save them to a separate file, thus simplifying the review process and enhancing the debugging experience.

Click through for a Powershell script that can help.

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Oracle Errors: Snapshot Too Old and LOB Columns

Published 2023-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

David Fitzjarrell tackles a pair of errors:

One of the few errors taht strikes fear in the heart of a DBA is the dreaded:

ORA-01555 snapshot too old
and
ORA-22924 snapshot too old

Of course there are plenty of blogs instructing the DBA to simply “increase the undo_retention”, and there are cases where this works as expected. However, LOBs can be different as two different mechanisms exist for undo management. A LOB column can be configured to use retention to manage before mages of the data, but that can be confusing as each LOB column MAY have its own retention setting. The DBA_LOBS view reports whether LOG column uses retention or pctversion to manage undo, and the associated setting being used. Let’s -dig into this a bit deeper.

Read on to learn more about how LOB retention works, the types of issues you can run into with it, and how to correct those issues.

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SortByColumn Set to Invalid Column ID in SSAS Tabular

Published 2023-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an error:

After making these changes, we pushed our changes into Azure DevOps and our deployment pipeline started to deploy the changes to the requested environment.

While the deployment process was executing, it stopped and failed promptly. We ran into an issue: “SortByColumn property set to an invalid column ID”

Read on to see the ultimate cause of and solution to the problem.

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In-Memory OLTP and Memory Allocation

Published 2023-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Tanayankar Chakraborty explains an error:

We recently encountered a support case where a customer using In-memory tables in an Azure SQL DB, receives an error message while trying to insert data into the table that also has a clustered columnstore index. The customer then deleted the entire data from the In-memory Tables (With the clustered columnstore index), however it appeared that the Index Unused memory was still not released. Here’s the memory allocation the customer could see:

Error

In addition to the error above- here is the error text:

Msg 41823, Level 16, State 109, Line 1

Could not perform the operation because the database has reached its quota for in-memory tables. This error may be transient. Please retry the operation. See ‘http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=623028‘ for more information

In this case, the error ends up being a “didn’t read the manual” type of error.

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RCSI and ID-Driven ETL

Published 2023-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart shares a warning:

Yesterday, Kendra Little talked a bit about Lost Updates under RCSI. It’s a minor issue that can pop up after turning on RCSI as the default behavior for the Read Committed isolation level. But she doesn’t want to dissuade you from considering the option and I agree with that advice.

In fact, even though we turned RCSI on years ago, by a bizarre coincidence, we only came across our first RCSI-related issue very recently. But it wasn’t update related. Instead, it has to do with an ETL process. To explain it better, consider this demo:

Michael has one example solution. I could also see a “windback” run, where, instead of starting at the very end of the line for ETL, you start a few hundred rows earlier. That way, you can pick up any stragglers. It would add some overhead to the ETL task, but given that ETL jobs should be idempotent, it shouldn’t affect the end results.

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Data Center Staffing Disasters

Published 2023-10-03 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones reads an after-action report:

There was a failure recently at an Azure data center in Australia when a utility power sag caused equipment to trip offline at one of the Azure data centers in Australia. You can read about it here, but essentially the headline is that there were only three people on site when the incident occurred, and that caused them to be unable to restart the equipment in time before an outage occurred.

Read on to learn more about why this failed and what Steve has seen in the wild.

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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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