BUG

I wish I could say that every DBA has a love/hate relationship with Replication, but, let’s face it, it’s only hate. But it could get worse: it could be Merge Replication. Or even worse: Merge Replication with FILESTREAM. What could possibly top all this hatred and despair if not a bug? Well, I happened to find one, that I will describe here. The scenario I published tables with FILESTREAM data before, but it seems like there is a particular planetary alignment that triggers an error during the execution of the snapshot agent. [Read More]

Today, thanks to a customer, I discovered one of those annoying little things that can really drive you nuts. Basically, they were trying to restore a backup using the SSMS Restore Database window and they kept getting “No backupset selected to be restored” whenever a backup file was selected. You just had to select a file for restore and click OK… … to be met with an error message in the Restore Database window: [Read More]

During the last few days I’ve been struggling to work around something that seems to be a bug in SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Collector in a clustered environment. It’s been quite a struggle, so I decided to post my findings and my resolution, hoping I didn’t contend in vain. SYMPTOMS: After setting up a Utility Control Point, I started to enroll my instances to the UCP and everything was looking fine. [Read More]

Looks like a sneaky bug made its way from SQL Server 2005 CTP to SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 almost unnoticed, or, at least, ignored by Microsoft. Imagine that you installed a new SQL Server instance (let’s call it “TEST”) and you want Database Mail configured in the same way as your other instances. No problem: you navigate the object explorer to Database Mail, start the wizard and then realize that you don’t remember the parameters to enter. [Read More]

Some bugs in Oracle’s code are really surprising. Whenever I run into this kind of issue, I can’t help but wonder how nobody else noticed it before. Some days ago I was querying AWR data from DBA_HIST_SYSMETRIC_SUMMARY and I wanted to turn the columns AVERAGE, MAXVAL and MINVAL into rows, in order to fit this result set into a performance graphing application that expects input data formatted as {TimeStamp, SeriesName, Value}. [Read More]