July 2015

PSSDiag Configuration Manager – A Companion for SQLNexus

Have you ever called Microsoft Customer Support for help with a SQL Server performance issue? The engineer will typically send you a self-extracting exe file with instructions to unzip the file on the server and run the pssdiag.cmd file to collect data while you reproduce your issue. Afterwards, you’re supposed to zip up the contents of the output folder and send it back to the engineer. How did the engineer compile that collection code so quickly? The answer is PSSDiag Configuration Manager, or simply DiagManager. DiagManager is just a tool that you use to configure which performance items are to...

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Use Trace Flag 902 to Recover from a Cumulative Update Failure

Recently, I ran into a critical error while I was helping a customer troubleshoot an issue in SQL Server. That may not sound like a big deal, but we were installing Cumulative Update 6 for SQL Server 2012 SP2 to fix our initial problem when we encountered the following error. What gives SQL Server? We just upgraded several other instances on this same server. Why does this one have to fail right now? Well, a quick peak in the errorlog sure points me in the right direction. Starting execution of SSIS_HOTFIX_INSTALL.SQL : : Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 4. The...

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