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Category: Error Handling

The Risk of Query Failure on Readable Secondaries in SQL Server

Published 2024-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little explains a problem:

If you use readable secondaries in Availability Groups or Read-Scale out instances in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you may have queries fail repeatedly if there is a glitch and statistics are not successfully “refreshed” on the secondary replica. Those queries may keep failing until you manually intervene.

This has been the case for a few years, and it’s unclear if Microsoft will fix this. There is a well established support deflection article which documents the issue and provides ‘workarounds’.

Read on for Kendra’s thoughts. I haven’t run into this before, myself, but I also don’t tend to make very heavy use of readable secondaries.

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Troubleshooting a Problem with sp_send_dbmail

Published 2024-02-16 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill applies the Sgt. Schultz defense:

I don’t like posting about issues unless I fundamentally understand the root cause. That’s not the case here. A lot of the explanation here will be hand-waving while spouting “here be dragons, and giants, and three-headed dogs”, but I know enough to give you the gist of the issue.

Click through for a fun story about Kerberos and behavioral changes after absolutely nothing happened.

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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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