Error 5123 Access DEnied re-creating snapshot

  • I have an Agent job that drops and then re-creates a snapshot of a mirrored DB every night. It's been running fine since I started it up a few weeks ago. Saturday night it encountered an error:

    Error 5123 Severity 16 State 1

    CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5 (access is denied) while attempting to open or create the physical file 'K:\Snapshots\dbfile2.snp'

    This is one file of many that are (re)created.

    I don't see anything else in Windows or SQL Server logs. The job ran again last night without any issues.

    Only thing I can think of is a timing / access issue between the drop and the recreate. Anyone else have any ideas?

  • That's usually because the file already exists or you don't have permission in the directory. What's the SQL that you're executing?

    Paul Randal
    CEO, SQLskills.com: Check out SQLskills online training!
    Blog:www.SQLskills.com/blogs/paul Twitter: @PaulRandal
    SQL MVP, Microsoft RD, Contributing Editor of TechNet Magazine
    Author of DBCC CHECKDB/repair (and other Storage Engine) code of SQL Server 2005

  • The SQL is dynamically created due to changing filegroups/files. Essentially, it's:

    DROP DATABASE olap_snap

    --auto-gen the actual files here via sys.database_files--

    CREATE DATABASE olap_snap ON

    (Name = [fliename], FILENAME = 'k:\snapshots\filename.snp'),

    (Name = [fliename2], FILENAME = 'k:\snapshots\filename2.snp')

    as SNAPSHOT of olap

  • The only thing I can think of is that the SQL statement completes before the file system has really finished dropping the file - which shouldn't happen. Could be a race condition somewhere, but again, it shouldn't happen.

    I tried running your code in a tight loop looking for @@ERROR=5123 with a variety of operations running against the source database (so the snapshot wasn't empty) and it didn't pop after a few hours.

    I'll check with some friends in the dev team and let you know if I hear anything.

    Paul Randal
    CEO, SQLskills.com: Check out SQLskills online training!
    Blog:www.SQLskills.com/blogs/paul Twitter: @PaulRandal
    SQL MVP, Microsoft RD, Contributing Editor of TechNet Magazine
    Author of DBCC CHECKDB/repair (and other Storage Engine) code of SQL Server 2005

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