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tfountain
Constraint Violating Yak Guru
491 Posts |
 Posted - 2007-12-06 : 14:59:39
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| First, let me state this is no longer an error, rather I wanted to share this experience with you. Primarily due to the fact I could not find any reference to this specific situation via Google, etc.ScenarioSQL Server 2005We have a linked server that points to xbase files on a local drive to the SQL database. This linked server is used to pull in data on a daily basis from a legacy XBase application. This setup has been in use for quite some time and once in awhile any query request using the linked server throw this exception:Cannot initialize the data source object of OLE DB provider "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0" for linked server "<somelinkedservername>".OLE DB provider "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0" for linked server "<somelinkedservername>" returned message "Could not find installable ISAM.".So I started digging into this and tried a few things. First, I attempted to drop and recreate the linked server. That was wishful thinking at best and, of course, the error still persisted. Then I noticed something very odd on the database. We had 80+ connections open from the Idera diagnositics software. These connections went back to the prior day at approximately 6 AM and every scheduled interval since. A quick DBCC INPUTBUFFER showed me they were making many calls to the WMI services on the machine. I shut down Idera and tried to kill all the connections and they just sat there in a KILLED/ROLLBACK state for over an hour (while I looked into the issue). Finally, I attempted to stop the WMI service and it gets stuck in a 'Stopping' state. Well, this tells me it's truly hung up for some reason. Eventually I used Sysinternals Process Explorer to identify the process and kill it manually. Once I restarted the service the linked server began working w/o an issue.With this in mind, I assume that the SQL Server utilizes a WMI provider for this type of situation (access to a dbase IV file on the local file system). As far as to why the WMI service became nonresponsive, I don't know why it did this right now. I speculated that perhaps the Idera product was causing it with not releasing all the COM resources (it used sp_OA procedures to call into WMI) but since I don't have the complete source I can not confirm. |
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tfountain
Constraint Violating Yak Guru
491 Posts |
Posted - 2007-12-06 : 15:21:46
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| UpdateThis may not be caused by the Idera product as this happened again and the product is uninstalled. However, a restart of the WMI service did correct the linked server and does not generate the error.So, anyone here with any experience dealing with this sort of issue? At face value, it appears that WMI is not responding to requests after a period. I really hate to having to revert to restarting this service everytime it hangs, after all, there needs to be a reason why it does hang periodically. |
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Error - Could not find installable ISAM