Troubleshooting

Dear McAfee, Why are you destroying my buffer pool?

For the past few months, one my customers had been trying to diagnose an issue with SQL Server paging out the entire buffer pool each morning around 8AM. See the error below. Not only was this causing some serious performance issues, but it was also affecting every SQL Server in the environment. I began my investigation with the standard troubleshooting techniques for buffer pool paging. One of the main workarounds that’s recommended is to enable the “locked pages in memory” permission for the SQL Server service account; however, this was not possible for this customer. Enabling that permission would violate...

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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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