Protocol error in TDS stream

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Protocol error in TDS stream

melthedba

SSCommitted

Points: 1630
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December 4, 2002 at 7:30 am

#174746

Hello,
Recently, I began receiving error messages while connecting to a server via Query Analyzer and running sp_helptext, for instance. I received the below error on numerous occasions:
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Protocol error in TDS stream
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Protocol error in TDS stream
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]TDS buffer length too large
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Unknown token received from SQL Server
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Unknown token received from SQL Server
Does anyone have a reason for this error and a fix? I've been searching the web and already updated MDAC to 2.7 but still the error persists. Other than MDAC, I haven't seen any other resolution suggested for the problem.
Thank you so much,
Melanie

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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Antares686 SSC Guru Points: 125444 More actions · Answer 1

Try reinstalling your NIC drivers. If the buffer is too large the driver may be screwing up packets. Might be server side or client side. ALso, as you stated you did MDAC 2.7 make sure both client and server.

melthedba SSCommitted Points: 1630 More actions · Answer 2

Hello Antares686,

Thank you very much for your recommendation. I'll try this and let you know how it goes.

Melanie

melthedba SSCommitted Points: 1630 More actions · Answer 3

Hello,

Well, our network guy decided to defrag all of our systems and so far we haven't experienced any TDS errors again... and hope we never do. We did not update MDAC nor touch the NIC cards.

Thanks,

Melanie

Jonr SSCrazy Points: 2566 More actions · Answer 4

Just as a follow up to this, we saw the same problem on a brand new, 4 processor HP server. Doing very simple remote select queries on it from another box took 1+ minute to return 1000 rows, over an hour to handle a 78,000 row table. Sometimes it would bomb out with:

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Unknown token received from SQL Server

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]TDS buffer length too large

(repeated 3x)

Running either query locally returned the data immediately, so we ruled out CPU, memory and disk I/O as a cause. This focused our attention on the network connection.

Eventually our resident network expert took a look at the pair of network cards and noticed a very large number of transmit errors in the properties tab, over 300,000,000. He tracked it down to a switch which had recently replaced an old hub, and the network card settings on the server hadn't been adjusted accordingly. They were set to half duplex, so he changed them to full duplex and everything went much faster - the 1000 rows query took just 2 seconds to return the full data set rather than over a minute.

Jon