Error Handling – Page 6

Australian Azure Downtime After-Action Report

Published 2023-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Note that 11:34, the decision was made to shut down infrastructure without Microsoft failing your databases over elsewhere. If you were an Azure SQL DB or Cosmos DB user, and you weren’t paying for replicas in another data center, it was up to you to follow Microsoft’s disaster recovery guidance.
Controversial opinion: I actually love that and I think it’s great.

That is definitely a controversial opinion, but it’s also one I agree with. Read on for more of Brent’s thoughts.

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STRING_SPLIT Not a Recognized Built-In Function Name

Published 2023-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little resolves an error:

Yesterday, I was writing some Transact SQL to dust off the cobwebs. I got confused when I was playing around with the STRING_SPLIT function, and kept getting the error:

Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 2 ‘STRING_SPLIT’ is not a recognized built-in function name.

When I saw this, I immediately thought compatibility level, as that’s something I’ve run into several times before. In this case, it turns out that the correct answer was something else.

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Executing Transactions in PostgreSQL

Published 2023-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Salman Ahmed rolls it back:

Transactions, like any other database, are a key component of PostgreSQL. A transaction is a sequence of one or more database operations that are executed as a single unit of work. These operations can be queries (e.g. SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE) that modify the database’s state.
A transaction’s main purpose is to combine multiple statements into an atomic, all-or-nothing process. It ensures that either all operations within a transaction are fully completed, or none of them are executed at all. Concurrent transactions cannot see each other’s unfinished changes. Updates from ongoing transactions remain hidden until completion, at which point all changes become visible simultaneously.

This is very similar to SQL Server, except their savepoints actually work they way they’re supposed to.

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CREATE OR ALTER and sp_ Procedures

Published 2023-08-28 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson hits an edge case:

It isn’t that such objects are to be completely avoided, it is that they are ONLY to be used when you need the special qualities. Ola Hallengren’s backup solution creates a dbo.sp_BackupServer procedure so you can run the backup command from any database.
But if you don’t need the special properties of the sp_procedure, they are bad for the reasons Aaron stated, the reason I stumbled upon today being just a special subset. In this case CREATE OR ALTER behaves differently than CREATE in a way that was really confusing to me as I was working on a piece of code today.

Read on for Louis’s tale of woe and confusion, but mostly confusion.

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External Table is Not in the Expected Format for Power Query

Published 2023-08-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb handles an error:

Sometimes when you’re importing data from files using Power Query in either Power BI or Excel you may encounter the following error:
DataFormat.Error: External table is not in the expected format
What causes it? TL;DR it’s because you’re trying to load data from one type of file, probably Excel (I don’t think you can get this error with any other source but I’m not sure), and actually connecting to a different type of file.

Read on for an example, a more detailed description of when you’d get the error, and how to fix it.

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TaskFactory Activation on an Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime

Published 2023-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard does some sleuthing:

I regularly help customers migrate SSIS to Azure-SSIS integration runtimes, a nifty component of Azure Data Factory. I was recently stumped by an error activating TaskFactory (Task Factory for the search engines…) on an Azure-SSIS IR node. The error was:
“The system cannot find the file specified.”

Read on to figure out where the file is and how to fix this error.

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Restoring SSAS Cubes to SQL Server 2022 CU5

Published 2023-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria runs into a problem:

I have a client who was upgrading some servers from pre-2022 versions of SQL Server to SQL Server 2022 CU7. They had some multidimensional SSAS cubes that were to go on the new server. But they ran into an issue after the upgrade. After restoring a backup of an SSAS database to the new server they found that they could no longer modify the data source using SSMS.

Read on to see what the problem was, as well as how to fix it.

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SQL Server Events: Attention Signal and User Error Message

Published 2023-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz explains the difference:

Several days ago, I got a service request where we had a conversation about the differences about SQL Server Events: Attention Signal and User Error Message. In the realm of SQL Server, a well-rounded understanding of various events is crucial for optimizing performance, troubleshooting issues, and maintaining a robust database environment. In this article, we’ll delve into three important events: “Attention Signal,” “User Error Message,” and “Command Timeout.” We’ll explore their significance, scenarios where they occur, and provide a practical script to simulate and capture these events. Let’s dive in!

Read on to understand the intent of each of these event types.

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ALTER TABLE SWITCH and Errors 4907, 4908, and 4912

Published 2023-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin works out some problems:

When it comes to managing tables and indexes in SQL Server, the ALTER TABLE SWITCH statement is a powerful tool for “moving” data swiftly between tables. However, this convenience can sometimes be met with frustrating roadblocks, such as errors 4907 and 4908.
These errors may be confusing about their underlying cause, particularly when the source and target tables have identical partitions, including in non-clustered indexes.

Read on to see what these error messages mean and how you can correct them.

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Thoughts on Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization

Published 2023-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Poche shares some thoughts:

First, I wanted to point out that there are fixes to issues specific to Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2022. The issue itself is documented at the link below.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/performance/parameter-sensitive-plan-optimization?view=sql-server-ver16#known-issues
When I heard about the issue, I heard that it could cause SQL Server 2022 to cause stack dumps every 15 minutes. The time interval made me think it was related to the default interval for Query Store, and that seems to be the case.

Jared has several thoughts on the topic as he puts together a talk on PSPO.

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Category: Error Handling