Today i want to write a short message about troubleshooting issues, especially issues on older systems. There are two sides to these issues.
First, the chances of running into these issues on newer systems is smaller, because software companies tend to upgrade and update software and even fix bugs every now and then. Ok, they get to introduce new bugs as well but that’s another story. My point is that is sometimes pays off to update your old stuff. With some good googling you might find that the issue has been fixed and that saves you a lot of work arounds or other tricks to make sure your old system keeps working.
Second, there’s a large chance you will find your error mentioned on the more respectable sites. Usually there’s a solution as well. But sometimes you need to look further and harder to get to the point.
Yesterday i ran into a weird issue at on of our clients. The main admin of the client drew my attention to the errorlog of the SQL Server asking me to look into an error generated by the DBCC CHECKDB process.
The main error was “error 3314 severity 17 state 3 (During undoing of a logged operation in database ‘X’, an error occurred at log record ID “, combined with error 665 (The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation)
The first searches ran wild into broken disks, defragmentation advise and suggestions to copy the database to another disk to decrease the physical defragmentation. This last one seems to be causing the issue, but just copying the datafiles (1.3 TB) didn’t feel like a longterm solution. And i want to get rid of weird errors, not try something and hope for the best.
In the end, i found a link back to the Microsoft site:
https://support.microsoft.com/hr-ba/help/967351/a-heavily-fragmented-file-in-an-ntfs-volume-may-not-grow-beyond-a-cert
It seems my client wasn’t the only one hitting this wall and microsoft made a hotfix. Because i can’t connect to the actual server (and rightfully so, i’m a DBA, not a sysadmin), i can’t see if the hotfix has been applied. But i asked the client to look into this.
Thanks for reading!
Reitse's blog 