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Category: Error Handling

Timeouts Attempting to Open Connections from High-Thread Applications

Published 2024-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz works through a customer issue:

Recently, I worked on a service request that a customer application reported the following error connecting to the database: “Timeout attempting to open the connection. The time period elapsed prior to attempting to open the connection has been exceeded. This may have occurred because of too many simultaneous non-pooled connection attempts.“. 

Following, I would like to share the experience learned here.

The issue isn’t extremely common, but it does happen, especially when applications don’t use connection pooling.

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Configuring Database Mail in Azure SQL MI

Published 2024-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword sends an e-mail:

SQL Agent jobs allow us to schedule and automate tasks on a SQL Server instance. Crucially, when things go wrong we need to know about them. That’s why we use notifications.

Setting up Operators and job Notifications is as expected on a Managed Instance. However, when it comes to sending the notifications we may have a challenge, as shown in the SQL Agent Error Logs:

Read on for the solution.

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Troubleshooting Chains of Common Table Expressions

Published 2024-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover calls me out:

I started using Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in Oracle before Microsoft SQL Server and found them easier to read than a derived table. Something about reading from the top down just clicked in my brain. As the years have passed, I’m less of a fan for one reason: troubleshooting a chained CTE with several links is hard—especially when it’s someone else’s code. Even the ones I wrote years ago fill me with unease when something breaks. Is there an easier way to break down each link in the chain when things go wrong?

This is, I would argue, the biggest inconvenience around using common table expressions. The fact that SQL Server cannot materialize the contents of CTEs is likely a more prevalent problem, but challenges in how you can troubleshoot the individual parts of common table expressions are real.

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Restarting Failed Control Flows in Azure Data Factory

Published 2024-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria doesn’t want to repeat good work:

I presented at SQL Saturday Pittshburgh this past weekend about populating your data warehouse with a metadata-driven, pattern-based approach. One of the benefits I mentioned is that it’s easy to employ this pattern for restartability.

For instance, let’s say I am loading data from 30 tables and 5 files into the staging area of my data mart or data warehouse, and one of table loads fails. I don’t want to reload the other tables I just loaded. I want to load the ones that have not been recently loaded. Or let’s say I have 5 dimensions and 4 facts, and I had a failure loading a fact table. I don’t want to reload my dimensions, and I only want to reload the failed facts. How do we accomplish this?

Read on to learn how.

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Permissions and BACPAC Files in Azure SQL DB

Published 2024-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Roberto Yonekawa diagnoses an error:

We had a support request where the customer was getting an error when trying to export his Azure SQL Database to a bacpac file using the SqlPackage command-line utility.

Error message:

Microsoft.Data.Tools.Diagnostics.Tracer Error: 19 : 2024-08-21T16:10:56 : Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac.DacServicesException: One or more unsupported elements were found in the schema used as part of a data package.

Error SQL71627: The element Permission has property Permission set to a value that is not supported in Microsoft Azure SQL Database v12.

Click through for the specific issue Roberto found. I’d imagine that there are other permission sets that are incompatible with Azure SQL Database and would cause this error message to pop up as well.

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Tips for Navigating the Support Ticket Process

Published 2024-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little shares several tips:

Asking Microsoft for support for SQL Server or Azure SQL is a lousy experience these days. This is true whether you are using a cheaper service tier or the more expensive support tier formerly known as “Premiere Support.” Either way, I’ve found the same issues: as the person requesting support, I must know a whole lot about the root cause of my problem and how to solve it, or my request will be dismissed with misinformation. I need to have data and metrics that back up my claims in order to get the ticket escalated to someone who can help, and I will need to provide those receipts three or four times. Once something is escalated to the Product Group, I may get a helpful response, but it will generally take a while. If I’m not engaged directly with the Product Group and the answer is being relayed through a lower support tier, it often won’t make much sense.

These issues don’t happen due to bad work ethics or personal failings of support workers. These are good humans, who are trying their best! The problem is worse, because it’s systemic.

Kendra’s specific advice is around Microsoft and the Azure SQL family of products (SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL Managed Instance) but the advice is sound for much more than that. This advice will help you out when dealing with the support organization for pretty much any large company.

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Generating a Multi-Aggregate Pivot in Spark

Published 2024-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank troubleshoots an issue:

I’m using a stream watermark to handle late arriving data – basically1) my watermark enables the stream to accept data arriving up to 10 seconds late …and that’s where the problem shows up.

When I run this streaming query – in Azure Databricks I can do this simply with display(df_pivot) – I receive the error:

AnalysisException: Detected pattern of possible ‘correctness’ issue due to global watermark. The query contains stateful operation which can emit rows older than the current watermark plus allowed late record delay, which are “late rows” in downstream stateful operations and these rows can be discarded. Please refer the programming guide doc for more details. If you understand the possible risk of correctness issue and still need to run the query, you can disable this check by setting the config `spark.sql.streaming.statefulOperator.checkCorrectness.enabled` to false.

Read on to learn more about the scenario, the issue, and the solution.

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mssql-tools 18 and Two Common Errors

Published 2024-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea covers a pair of errors you might run into with mssql-tools version 18:

In this post I cover the 0A000086 and “command not found” errors that you might encounter with the new version of SQL Server command-line tools, namely sqlcmd and bcp, for Linux.

While the latest version of SQL Server command-line tools, based on Microsoft ODBC 18, brings improvements, it also brings some gotchas that can break your automations.

Read on to learn more about each.

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