December 12, 2012 at 12:05 pm
We have a relatively straightforward database that the users access via a web page. The web page is on redundant servers behind an F5 load balancer. It is an aspx web site that makes extensive use of the Ajax Control Toolbox. In general, the site runs perfectly, especially from the client-user's standpoint. However, about once ever month to 6 weeks, the site super-users, who load data to the SQL Server database, experience a period of hours to two or three days, where they can not load a file. The rest of the time, this functionality works perfectly.
We have tried numerous bizarre approaches (the normal have already failed) to correct this issue. We have tried IIS restarts, web server (one or both) reboots, database server reboots, etc. Occasionally, one of these desperate measures will be successful at correcting the problem, but more often than not, the problem clears up for some "unknown " reason.
I am immediately suspicious that somewhere in the food chain of dba's and technicians that inhabit the infrastructure of our quite huge organization, someone is doing something that corrects the issue and either doesn't want to fess up to the issue; or, more likely, corrects some issue they believe to be unrelated, or not even aware of our problem, and it coincidentally corrects our issue.
I have been a SQL Server developer for close to 20 years; so, I think I know what I am doing on the code side of SQL server - although, I readily confess that my eyes glaze over when discussing dba activities. Am I possibly missing something obvious? Or, is this just one of those arcane problems that will continue to haunt us for years until we finally abandon SQL Server for HaDoop or whatever the next flavor of information storage and retrieval happens to be?
As a last note, I continue to be very suspicious of the communications path between the web servers and the SQL server. If I am up in the night in this regard, please let me know. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
December 12, 2012 at 12:26 pm
I can appreciate that sometimes you can't say exactly what you're doing, but for anyone to help in this scenario, you're going to have to at least be more specific as to exactly what you mean by "load a file". That could be almost anything, as the definition might be widely recognized in your specific environment, but I could come up with a half-dozen completely different things it might actually represent. You also didn't mention whether the "can't" part involves getting an error message, or for that matter, exactly what "can't" means in your scenario. Again, we're not going to be able to even start coming up with ideas when we 1) don't know what it is you can't do, and 2) don't know how you determined that you couldn't do it.
Please be more detailed, as help is only easy to provide when we have some idea what your problem actually is.
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
December 12, 2012 at 1:43 pm
The file being loaded is a plain old CSV file - names, addresses, etc. All ASCII characters and all demographic type information.
December 12, 2012 at 1:49 pm
Ok, that's a start, but I still don't know what "can't load" means. What is the basic process to load this file? Is the web page using a script or a .NET assembly to perform the task of reading that file and getting the data into the datbase? Is there an error message? Is the file import handled by a DTS or SSIS package? Might there be an external dependency on some particular format for the external file involved? I could keep asking questions, but hopefully, you'll realize that one question often leads to another, and that you might want to be as detailed as possible in indicating exactly what does or does not take place.
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
December 12, 2012 at 5:12 pm
The web page makes a call to the database which fires a stored procedure. On the times that it fails it returns a timeout error. If I go to the database and execute the procedure with the file that the users are attempting to load, it loads just fine. BTW, I lied to you about the file being a CSV file; it is a text file that uses a fixed field length to define the structure. The first step that occurs is a bulk load to a "holding file" from which the record is broken up into its data elements and added to a process table. Without fail, this portion of the load usually finishes.
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