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Category: Error Handling

Understanding Error Severity Levels 19 through 25 in SQL Server

Published 2025-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Stedman handles an error:

SQL Server uses error severity levels to indicate the nature and seriousness of an error. These severity levels range from 0 to 25, with each level indicating a different type of issue, from informational messages to catastrophic failures. In this post, we’ll focus on severity levels 19 through 25, which are typically the most critical errors that can occur in SQL Server.

Fortunately, given how devastating they are, severity level 21 and higher are extremely rare in my experience.

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SSIS: Operating Completed with Problems Logged

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin uses Integration Services to process an Analysis Services cube:

If you process SSAS cubes via SSIS packages you might notice a weird message like “Full Processing:Warning: Server: Operation completed with XXX problems logged.“

How you can get that message (if you have that problem):

Slava notes that the simple solution doesn’t actually work, as both services decide not to store that information. But Slava does provide a solution to the problem.

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Partitioned Tables and Indexes in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Hettie Dombrovskaya runs into an error:

Here is a story. When anyone gives a talk about partitions, they always bring up an example of archiving: there is a partitioned table, and you only keep “current” partitions, whatever “current” means in that context, and after two weeks or a month, or whatever interval works for you, you detach the oldest partition from the “current” table and attach it to the “archived” table, so that the data is still available when you need it, but it does not slow down your “current” queries.

So here is Hettie confidently suggesting that a customer implement this technique to avoid querying a terabyte-plus-size table. A customer happily agrees, and life is great until one day, an archiving job reports an error of a “name already exists” for an index name.

Read on to learn why.

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SQL Server and File Access

Published 2025-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea troubleshoots an issue:

This is one of those things that’s obvious for anyone with a bit of SQL Server and Windows experience, but stumps a lot of newcomers.
Especially when it comes to students going through tasks like creating and restoring databases.

It’s also one of those things that I have to explain on a regular basis, so might as well have detailed explanation with examples I can direct people to in the future.

The latest example being this reddit post in r/SQL, where the wrongest answer has the highest upvotes.

Read on for a story about Operating system error 5 (Access is denied). And if I hear anybody switching the virtual service account running SQL Server to Local System, I will personally tell you it’s an awful idea and to stop it.

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Sending E-mails in SSRS over Ports other than 25

Published 2025-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin fixes an error:

After configuring an Email subscription, the subscription result shows: “Failure sending mail: One or more errors occurred.“. In this blog post I will share how I investigated and resolved one such failure.

My first step in troubleshooting this error was to query from the ExecutionLog3 view inside the ReportServer database. I normally do this to check if and why a report subscription has failed its run.

However, in this case all the log records showed success (rsSuccess status):

Read on to see what this indicates, how Eitan was able to troubleshoot the problem, and the ultimate fix.

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Availability Group Seeding and Transient Failure 108

Published 2024-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan runs into an error with an availability group:

The availability group in question was unhealthy, and none of the added databases were syncing. By the time I started investigating, the SQL service on the secondary had been restarted. There were also no recent errors in Failover Cluster Manager.

I checked the SQL Server Error Log and found some clues. The SQL Server Error Log was filled with “Always On: DebugTraceVarArgs” errors for each database that included the message:

“Seeding encountered a transient failure ‘108’, retrying…”

Read on to see how Chad fixed this.

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Sending Alerts from Fabric Workspace Monitoring

Published 2024-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a new Bat-signal:

I’ve always been a big fan of using Log Analytics to analyse Power BI engine activity (I’ve blogged about it many times) and so, naturally, I was very happy when the public preview of Fabric Workspace Monitoring was announced – it gives you everything you get from Log Analytics and more, all from the comfort of your own Fabric workspace. Apart from my blog there are lots of example KQL queries out there that you can use with Log Analytics and Workspace Monitoring, for example in this repo or Sandeep Pawar’s recent post. However what is new with Workspace Monitoring is that if you store these queries in a KQL Queryset you can create alerts in Activator, so when something important happens you can be notified of it.

Read on to learn more.

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