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Enterprise Manager hang

My customer’s SQL 2000 .818 box has started timing out when he tries to use Enterprise manager to backup or restore a database.

After giving him the command to run in Query Analyzer, I took a look at his backup tables in MSDB and found roughly 3.8 million records in each…dating back to mid 2005.

I’ll be running sp_delete_backuphistory tonight. 🙂

If you don’t want to use the cursor driven proc provided by MSFT, click here for Tara Kizer’s custom script:
isp_DeleteBackupHistory

Sorry for the long delay between postings…its been slow 🙂

Kevin3NF

Slow day at the office…

Alpha
Beta
Cisco
Dell
Ethernet
Firewall
Google
Hacker
Intel
Java
Kilobyte
Linux
Monitor
Netmon
Oracle
Port
Quicken
RAM
Sun
Trojan
Unix
Virus
Windows
Xeon
Yahoo
Zero

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