Another recently answered question from a colleague. My colleague posted the following question (modified a bit to leave relevant information only): From: <Removed_Intentionally> Sent: <Removed_Intentionally> To: <Removed_Intentionally>...

( This post has been extended with SQL Server Agent failing to start because "The EventLog service has not been started" (Second Part) ) One customer reported to us that their SQL Server 2000's SQL Server Agent services, recently started to...

If you have an OLE DB Source within a Data Flow in your SSIS package, and you click on the Preview button to get a sample (max of 200 rows) of the data returned by the statement you have configured, and the server takes more than 30 seconds to return...

I had a customer who was receiving the "Cannot generate SSPI context error" when one, and only one, of his users with a specific domain account tried to log into a SQL Server 2005 using TCP network library and Windows Authentication. It ended...

One recent discovery I wanted to eventually share here. Many more programs than you would expect, store information in temporary files. If you configure your environment so that those temporary files get created in a remote location, you will suffer the...

Have you ever experienced this error in SQL Server 2005 and under the same circumstances, but using SQL Server 2000 instead, you never "suffered" this problem? This issue was recently raised to my attention. And its resolution I found it of general...

One colleague reported to me that one of his customers was getting the following error message when trying to install SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2: Func Name='RestoreSetupParams'> Failed to find installation media path due to datastore exception...

I invested some time today investigating what SQL Server does with the initialization of TEMPDB’s log file, because a question was raised last week during Robert Davis session on TEMPDB at SQL PASS Summit in Seattle, and I wasn’t sure about what the answer...

I’ve found myself answering these questions more than three times only during the the last week. All those questions coming from very different people with different profiles. Some being our customers, some being partners, and even from some coworkers...

Another troubleshooting story to share...   Customer was using SQL Server 2000 (build 8.00.2162). They use SQL Agent mail for sending notifications about job completion. They upgraded their Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003, and since then...

This week, while working in a customer, they showed to me a weird (an somehow inconsistent) experience with SQL Server Profiler. The story was like this: In a laptop that was running Windows 7 (x64) when they launched Profiler.exe (the one installed with...

  Somebody was trying to run the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard (DTSWizard.exe) in one of his machines, but when he clicked Next on the first (welcome) dialog, it showed the following error:     ===================================...

This is the story of a case which took me some time to diagnose, and which I considered worth sharing, not because it's potential to become a common problem in many customer scenarios, but more because how interesting the troubleshooting steps could be...

Say you are one of those users who have been using SQL Server since 6.x days. And say you remember that in those versions there was the possibility to backup or restore a single table. Let's try hard to imagine your memory is good enough to be able to...

Let's imagine that your instance of MSDE cannot be brought online because of any reason, like when your master database became corrupted or the their files are unavailable. Under such circumstances, if you try to rebuild the master database with a command...

You may be trying to apply one hotfix, one Cumulative Update or one Service Pack on top of your SQL Server 2005 instance and it fails, showing the following information in the setup log, and ERRORLOG, respectively:   From setup log: <Func Name...

One colleague recently asked me, is the information in this article 914278 (How SQL Server 2005 Express Edition determines the CPU count and uses the CPUs during processing) was also applicable to the Standard Edition of SQL Server 2005? And following...

Even though the documentation doesn't explicitly explain the existence of this limitation, a failover clustered instance of SQL Server (whether it is 2000 or 2005) doesn't support loading data or log files of any database from disks other than those which...

Somebody told me today that he was using SQL Server Management Studio Database Properties (Files Page) to try to set the Initial Size property of a database file to a value lower than the one currently set for that file on the server. And even though...

This is something I planned to start a while ago and never found the time to do it properly. The idea behind this series of posts is to highlight what are all those benefits which are only available in the Enterprise Edition. Not only the ones well renown...

Last week I was involved in a discussion about the default transaction isolation level used by the transaction objects in WCF’s services (Serializable) versus the one used by the transaction objects in Entity Framework for SQL Server (ReadCommitted) whose...

One customer reported that when he was executing the following batch use master exec sp_updatestats from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) he was getting different results than when the same stored procedure was ran from a SQL Server Agent's Job. Specifically...

First part of this post is available at SQL Server Agent failing to start because "The EventLog service has not been started" . I've just confirmed an improvement has been already checked-in into SQL Server 2008's code which keeps up calling...

A colleague reported to me what she considered a weird behavior, she was experiencing while trying to monitor her SQL Server 2005 instances' performance counters. Her main concern was this: Why do my SQL Server 2005 counters do not report actual values...

This is another problem I've been working on recently, whose resolution I felt could be interesting to share here. Let's first reproduce the errors, before trying to explain anything. So, please, connect to your instance of SQL Server 2005 and run this...