SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

Phantom Cluster

I have just uninstalled SQL Server 2000 and reinstalled it. I don’t understand how what I experienced can even be possible but here’s the situation: I have a SQL Server which is sitting on a domain controller called GlasgowRPT, running a domain called Glasgow. I found recently that a service I was writing was not inserting data to GlasgowRPT. I ran profiler and saw all the SQL Statements as I expected starting and completing. Performing a cut & paste from Profiler to Query Analyzer showed that the SQL was correct and the inserts performed perfectly when applied manually against the database. A little while later… … I noticed that Profiler was listening to (Glasgow) rather than GlasgowRPT. I tried to connect to Glasgow through Query Analyzer and found this is where all the data had been going. I created a new registration in EM and found the data files were distinct and different to GlasgowRPT. There was another instance running on the box. In Service Manager, only 1 server instance was listed – stopping this service stopped BOTH Glasgow and GlasgowRPT. On another box, GlasgowCOM01, I found this had now also stopped. It’s also a domain controller, for the same domain, and it seemed to believe that GlasgowCOM01 and Glasgow were the same thing, just like the GlasgowRPT box. While stopped, I renamed the folder containing the Glasgow data files. On restarting, both successfully restarted but both looked exactly like GlasgowRPT now so Glasgow had repointed where it looked at its data files. This morning when I came back to look at it after the weekend, the data contents had switched so that now Glasgow had the manually inserted rows and GlasgowRPT had all the data my service had been feeding. Reading back, you’ll probably think I’m loopy but the above all really did happen, and I’m sure there must be some logical explanation for it (like clustering) but I can’t see anywhere that anyone has done this before. I don’t know if I could recreate the situation – it all looks fine now that I’ve uninstalled and re-installed – but I would like to know what just happened? I’ve checked for viruses and hidden cameras in case any one’s playing a joke! Anyone have any clue? Dave Hilditch.
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One thing I am not clear on, do you have a cluster, or don’t you? —————————–
Brad M. McGehee, MVP
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No, I don’t have a cluster. This is SQL Server 2000 developer edition running on Windows 2000 standard. I don’t know if it’s possible to fool SQL Server into clustering when you have these products – I guess it may be. I think it’s probably something else though, and is probably just a SQL Server bug that no-one else has found yet. Now that it’s reinstalled everything is running fine. I can still refer to either Glasgow or GlasgowRPT but they now both definitely refer to the same thing (GlasgowRPT) and are remaining as that as far as I can tell. Dave Ask a SQL Server Question
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<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by dhilditch Reading back, you’ll probably think I’m loopy <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I think you’re loopy [<img src=’/community/emoticons/emotion-5.gif’ alt=’

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One possible explanation?… round about the time when things started going a bit crazy with this server, one of my colleagues tried to load about 4 million rows per table, for about 20 tables, into the database. It looked like it had crashed after about 4 hours or so and so he killed it, then I killed sql server through the Task Manager. On restarting, the Event Viewer showed that SQL Server was recovering – it took a while to get up to 100% – but I’m thinking now maybe when it recovered it recreated its own data files but mistakenly in a sub directory of the data folder. This is the point at which it got confused I believe but would have to go back and recreate the situation to know for sure. Someone else, somewhere, must have experienced this before? Daev/ Ask a SQL Server Question
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