Informal Poll: What Are Your Favorite Error Log Messages?

SQL Server
37 Comments

I Know You Have Yours

Gone Fishin’

I have mine. When I go looking at a server for the first time, I wanna know about stuff like corruption, stack dumps, 15 second I/O warnings, frozen I/O, and non-yielding schedulers.

You know, the real meaty, hair on fire stuff.

Hm. Meat on fire. I’m hungry.

Despite how relatively easy it is to dig through the error log for stuff, most people don’t do it, even programmatically.

I can understand not wanting to go through by hand — that’s a nightmare. You end up sifting through gobs of successful backup and login failed messages. Yeah, you can suppress those, but that doesn’t help the first time you look at a server.

And so I pose the question to you, dear readers:

What are your favorite error log messages?

Leave a comment. It’s Friday. You’re already drunk, anyway.

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37 Comments. Leave new

  • Object Reference not set to an instance of an Object

    Reply
  • Error: 9245, Severity: 16, State: 1.
    During the last time interval 6 query notification errors were suppressed.

    Reply
  • I used to regularly get a “catastrophic failure” on SQL 2000.

    Reply
  • SQL Server was unable to close sessions and connections in a reasonable amount of time and is aborting “polite” shutdown.

    Reply
  • SQL Server crying for help – please simplify the query!! “The query processor ran out of internal resources and could not produce a query plan. This is a rare event and only expected for extremely complex queries or queries that reference a very large number of tables or partitions. Please simplify the query. If you believe you have received this message in error, contact Customer Support Services for more information.”

    Reply
  • Greg Dickinson
    May 12, 2018 3:19 pm

    Error 1205 : Transaction (Process ID) was deadlocked on resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

    “You are the weakest link. Goodbye!”

    Reply
  • Henrik Staun Poulsen
    May 14, 2018 2:41 am

    * BEGIN STACK DUMP:
    is what I’m currently struggling with.

    Reply
    • Erik Darling
      May 14, 2018 9:43 am

      Henrik — that’s never any good. When I see those, I open a ticket with Microsoft.

      Reply
  • Fatal IO errors i.e. 823,824 and 825.

    Reply
  • “string or binary data would be truncated”. Can’t give you more hints

    Reply
  • “There is insufficient system memory to run RAISERROR.”
    …but, how did you raise and log this error then?!?

    Reply
  • Eric Prévost
    May 14, 2018 8:09 am

    “BACKUP failed to complete the command %.*ls. Check the backup application log for detailed messages.”
    But no detailed message in Application event log or SQL Server’s ERRORLOG. All that while running a simple native backup command (no 3rd party involved)….

    Reply
  • My favorite is “The Service Broker endpoint is in disabled or stopped state” because it usually means my Availability Groups are working fine.

    Reply
  • Ok, this isn’t SQL Server but, back in the day, on old Vax machines VAX Basic would return: “Program lost, sorry”. Still my all time favorite…

    Reply
  • 666 of course. Doesn’t happen that often, though. 🙂

    Reply
  • SharePoint 2016 + SQL 2016 Stack dumps =
    A system assertion check has failed. Check the SQL Server error log for details. Typically, an assertion failure is caused by a software bug or data corruption. To check for database corruption, consider running DBCC CHECKDB. If you agreed to send dumps to Microsoft during setup, a mini dump will be sent to Microsoft. An update might be available from Microsoft in the latest Service Pack or in a Hotfix from Technical Support.
    Juicy!!

    Reply
    • Erik Darling
      May 14, 2018 9:47 am

      Kevin — Uninstall SharePoint. I hear that makes everyone happy.

      Reply
      • Hahaha I like your idea, Erik! I will pass that along to management, after all, it’s the best way to guarantee no more SQL stack-dumps!
        I will hopefully see you at SQL Saturday in NYC this weekend!

        Reply
  • I nominate this one:
    Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 4.
    The transaction log for database ‘NotMyDB!’ is full due to ‘ACTIVE_TRANSACTION’.

    Reply
  • Michael Best
    May 20, 2018 11:19 pm

    I had this one lately when a SP patch didn’t end well. I’ll have nightmares about this for a LONG time. (DISCLAIMER: I didn’t set the memory like this and didn’t check it before running the service pack executable)
    Error: 5831, severity: 16, state: 1. Minimum server memory value (5000) must be less than or equal to the maximum value (4096).
    Error: 912, Severity: 21, State: 2. Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘sqlagent100_msdb_upgrade.sql’ encountered error 5831, state 1, severity 16. This is a serious error condition which might interfere with regular operation and the database will be taken offline. If the error happened during upgrade of the ‘master’ database, it will prevent the entire SQL Server instance from starting. Examine the previous errorlog entries for errors, take the appropriate corrective actions and re-start the database so that the script upgrade steps run to completion.
    Error: 3417, Severity: 21, State: 3. Cannot recover the master database. SQL Server is unable to run. Restore master from a full backup, repair it, or rebuild it.

    Reply

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