A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
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.
Comments closedTanayankar 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.
Comments closedMichael 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.
Comments closedSteve 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.
Comments closedJose Manuel Jurado Diaz opens a few ports:
Our customer began to encounter Error 10060 after scaling up to the Business Critical tier. Upon investigation, we realized that the “Proxy” connection type was working, but the “Redirect” type was causing issues.
Read on to see why this happened, as well as what the fix was.
Comments closedDavid 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.
Comments closedOlivier 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.
Comments closedJose 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.
Comments closedChad Callihan wants to know what’s going wrong:
Many times, when I’m using Extended Events, I’m filtering on an Id or procedure name in query text and tracking what’s hitting a database. In these cases, I’m assuming queries are going to complete successfully. Did you know Extended Events can be useful when you’re expecting things to go wrong? Let’s look at how we can use Extended Events to track down error messages.
You’ll get a fair amount of noise on a busy server–especially dev servers where people are writing queries and trying things out—but this is a great technique for seeing if something has gone wrong and we need to look into it before a customer reaches out.
Comments closedBill Fellows runs into an interesting oddity:
Yet another thing that has bitten me working in SparkSQL in Databricks—this time it’s data types.
In SQL Server, a tinyint ranges from 0 to 255 but both of them allow for 256 total values. If you attempt to cast a value that doesn’t fit in that range, you’re going to raise an error.
SQL Server’s TINYINT data type is an unsigned one-byte number, whereas TINYINT in Spark SQL is a signed one-byte number. But that’s not the biggest difference Bill finds, so check out the post to learn more.