Kevin3NF

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Comment of the day from the newsgroups:

Until you test a backup by restoring, you don’t have recovery plan, you have a recovery hope.

— Geoff N. Hiten
Senior Database Administrator
Microsoft SQL Server MVP

 

I got a “middle of the night panic call” this morning. My customer was moving 2 user databases to a new drive on the same server.

After detach and copy, he re-attached successfully. But, the databases are in read-only mode and cannot be changed (Error 5105, Device activation error. The physical file name ‘%.*ls’ may be incorrect.)

SQL 2000, post Sp3, Windows 2003, sp1.

Additional errors:
2007-01-16 03:06:41.02 spid61 Starting up database ‘MyDatabase’.
2007-01-16 03:06:41.02 spid61 udopen: Operating system error 5(Access is denied.) during the creation/opening of physical device F:SQLDataMyDatabase_Data.mdf.
2007-01-16 03:06:41.02 spid61 FCB::Open failed: Could not open device F:SQLDataMyDatbase_Data.mdf for virtual device number (VDN) 1.
2007-01-16 03:06:41.02 spid61 udopen: Operating system error 5(Access is denied.) during the creation/opening of physical device F:SQLDataMyDatabase_Log.ldf.
2007-01-16 03:06:41.02 spid61 FCB::Open failed: Could not open device F:SQLDataMyDatabase_Log.ldf for virtual device number (VDN) 2.

Turned out that the SQL Server startup account did not have the correct security permissions on the folder or the files. Whoops. 🙂

Kevin3NF

New Year’s resolutions kill Log Shipping!

ok…funniest issue I’ve run across in a while 🙂

We have some custom log shipping script that was working just fine until the end of 2006. Starting around January 2, the restore process couldn’t restore fast enough to keep the standby server current.

I looked at the T-Log files for the last 2 weeks and saw that the T-log backups between 3 and 5 am were 2 to 3 times the size they used to be.

Why? Because the customer here is a national Fitness center business that had a huge influx of memberships and activities 🙂

People trying to lose weight broke log shipping.

The fix? Run the restore process more often (it was only running off hours).

You get fries AND a low-fat shake with this one…

Kevin3NF

Old stuff can still work…

Got called to a “server down” the other day. SQL 7.0, running on Windows NT 4.0, on a dual PII 333 server maxed out at 1GB RAM.

Seems that the SQL Server for some reason was extremely slow. Customer thought disk space was an issue, but he had over a gig free and wan’t autogrowing.

Ran sp_updatestats, which took over an hour on 12gb of data.

Looked into task manager….found SQL Server only using 50MB of RAM.

As it turns out, Microsoft Message Queue was taking over 800MB of the 1GB of memory. Whoops.

Solution (3 hours later): Purge the MSMQ journal.

SQL Server is now flying.

You want fries with that?

Kevin3NF

Replication troubleshooting

If you are getting errors in any of the replication agents (SQL 2000), and the GUI isn’t giving you the details you need, turn on logging.

This is not an intuitive process, and when you are done you will want to make sure you turn it off or the log file can eventually fill up your drive given enough time.

To log an agent’s activities, right-click on the Agent in Replication Monitor in Enterprise Manager. Select Agent Properties. You should get the Job info for the agent. Click the steps tab and Edit the “Run Agent” step.

You should see a command line with a bunch of parameters. Add these at the end:
-output c:\Agent_log.txt -outputverboselevel 3

Change the path and file name of the first one to an appropriate drive on the Distribution server.

The outputverboselevel parameter is documented as taking 0, 1 and 2 in Books Online. 3 is also an option and records everything.

If you wind up calling Microsoft SQL Server support, they will likely ask you for this info.

Good luck, and happy replicating!

Kevin3NF