Hi Developer that wanders the internet searching for the solution to your bug. Take a brief moment and vote for us, bunch of developers who also wander the internet to search solutions for our bugs and blog about them to help others 🙂
Microsoft Canada and TechNet Innovation Code Awards
We’ll be good and post more on our blog, interesting, good stuff :-p
Kidding, let the code prevail!
Oh, we’re the Tablet PC team, good stuff with SQL Server 2005 and Smart Clients 😉
Hi all,
As I mentioned in my previous post, i would provide details of the data loss scenarios in Merge Replication topologies with SQL Server 2005. The details were published in this addendum to the original DevX article:
UPDATED SQL Server 2005 Bug Alert: Data Loss in Merge Replication
the article is basically two repros to illustrate the data loss when the partition groups are not use in the publication. The workaround is not published and the definite solution should be available on SQL SErver 2005 SP3 or the upcoming cumulative update in February 2008.
Today I came across a blog post regarding SQL Server bugs and how to provide the information to tech support or to the Connects program.
Please read this blog post if you are posting/investigating bugs. The more information you provide, the faster the bug might be scheduled for a fix:
What is interesting on that blog post is one of the comments from a MS employee “anna”:
I know there is no excuse to use fault language or be rude to have your bug scheduled first, however, there is also no excuse to have data loss due to insufficient testing or a newly introduced bug.
I can only speak for myself, but in our case the merge topology had worked fault free for over a year before we upgraded to the 2005 version.
We are humans and we err, but we are also accountable for our code and our testing procedures. It’s not a matter of taking pride on pointing out a fault. I would rather not have had the data loss issue at all and the overtime and stress that happened after in order to recover the data and avoid future losses.
Why taking so much pride in the work we do or the code we write? Maybe it’s better to ask why not?
I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly due to my workload that has sky rocketed.
My most recent challenge is with SQL Server 2005 Merge Replication.
We have had quite a few undesirable effects when we upgraded our subscribers from ole good MSDE to SQL Server Express.
The side effects led to data loss and emergency fixes, in a really chaotic way. This data loss didn’t happen with MSDE.
The article I recently published on DevX described a data loss scenario with SQL Server 2005 Ent as publisher/distributor and MSDE or SQLE as subscriber.
The scenario we got recently happens only with SQLE in the subscribers and is related to the parameterized filter optimizations in SQL Server 2005.
Tweaking the parameters @use_partition_groups and @keep_partition_changes produce different side effects that go from data loss to inability to merge the data, the parameterized filters stop working.
If you’re interested on the subject hang on, I will publish repros in the next post.
If anyone knows how to set up the Windows Synchronization Manager for Verbose History Logging to output to a file, please comment here, all my attempts have failed.
Cheers and happy holidays!
After a month of talking over the phone with Microsoft tech support and more than a month and a half of struggling with then problem and trying to isolate the cause; I put together a short article on how to lose your data with merge replication if you use parameterized row filtering and upgrade your publisher from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005.
The details of the problem, steps to reproduce the behavior and scripts can be found on this article published on DevX:
SQL Server 2005 Bug Alert: Merge Replication Could Mean Data Loss
My main purpose is to speed up the resolution, so any comments, workarounds or similar cases you might find, please give me a shout.
Have a great weekend!
PG
Way to go! Yay!
I particularly like this one about silicone implants :-))
Visit the original gallery here.
Now going nerdy on how fast is to set up this gallery, what’s even more interesting is the way to publish images in a batch using Windows XP Explorer. I do have to reverse eng the process, one modification in the registry and the windows explorer can publish any folder with images in three clicks…Publishing from Mac is as fast.
If you have minimum computer skills, you can set up your own image gallery with this script. Honest, stop sharing your family pictures in Flickr, Ringo or any other public website and have your own space. You can even have your grandma upload the images for the family :-p
If you need hosting and domain registration for your gallery, Chihost is the best to go with.
I submitted the following bug to the Microsoft Connect program for SQL Server 2005. If you have found problems with row filtering and merge replication in SQL Server 2005 please vote for a quicker resolution.
298931
Cheers!
We finally launched our external sql server 2005 with merge replication with pull subscriptions. After extensive QA testing, surprising data loss due to filtering, more testing with new parameterized row filter, we finally made it.
Right after we launched the servers (our publisher and distributor) and the subscribers began to synchronize we had a few conflicts we hadn’t seen in any of the test environments.
The conflict cause was CONNECT REPLICATION permission missing on the users; the server data overwrote the client data on each case.
The Books Online documentation is pretty scarce on this new permission. It only says that if you have CONTROL permission at Database level, the CONNECT REPLICATION permission is implied on the database. Also if you have CONTROL SERVER permission at server level, the CONNECT REPLICATION permission is implied as well. Other than that, there isn’t much.
The official article documenting the breaking changes can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143470.aspx
and it does not mention the difference in permissions.
The breaking change here is that this permission that you can set through the Securables item on the user properties is brand new to SQL Server 2005.
On a SQL Server 2000 engine, the Management Studio looks like:
While on SQL Server 2005 the set of permissions for a given database looks like:
We’re involved in extending an application with WinForms 2.0 and CAB. I thought I would put the resources I used to learn about this framework in a single place, my blog :-p, as opposed to have the URLs saved on my bookmarks.
Here it goes, in other of preference:
Later on, the online reference links for each pattern used in CAB.
Cheers!
After our server upgrade to SQL Server 2005, some of the stored procedures stopped working. The reason, the change in behavior of the @@identity function in 2005:
The value of @@identity is not restricted by current scope and can be affected, for example, by triggers. I.e. if original ‘insert’ deals with table T1, and the table T1 has a trigger that inserts rows into table T2, then after the original insert is done the @@identity will show new value for the table T2 (not for the T1 as might be expected!!!)
The suggested solution is using SCOPE_IDENTITY()function instead of @@identity. This function IS restricted by the scope and for the example above it will return new identity value for the original table T1 (not for T2 or any other table affected by triggers).
It seems to me that SELECT MAX(T1) FROM T1 is not the best solution, because T1 (and any other) table can be updated simultaneously from multiple sessions and the maximal value is not always guaranteed.
If you have merge replication going on, be aware that now replication uses triggers that were not present in 2000:
For instance – insert trigger MSmerge_ins_5D17CE9EBD2142E3ADC630C47F017946 which does insert rows into other system table with identity column!!! We didn’t see these triggers in SQL 2000 database which may explain why the @@identity worked fine in the same code under SQL 2000.
Hope this helps and happy upgrading!
PG
I’m sometimes amazed how personal people takes the bug issue. If you look at users you can sometimes think that the users think we have a complete bug list or that we have super powers to figure out what the problem are. And believing that a rotten attitude gets the problem fixed faster is so stupid.
But if you look at it from the other perspective, I often find developers taking pride in classifying something as a bug. In these days of agile and customer driven development, why taking so much pride into saying if something is a bug or a change request.
During the past two years we’ve gotten two synchronization bugs fixed in SQL Server 2005. My tips: be honest, give all information you have, understand that everyone wants to fix the bugs and don’t forget that the guys fixing and confirming the stuff are people. Often really nice people. And also remember that reporting a bug is like going to the ER: sometimes there are people who are sicker than you and they need help first.