[dba-SQLServer] Whats going on and how to fix it

John W. Colby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Jan 24 12:34:00 CST 2005


I created a new field in one of my "little tables" - ~10 fields, 64 million
records, wrong data type by mistake.  I went in to design view and changed
the datatype.  When I closed the table EM "went away" with the hourglass.  4
hours later still an hour glass.  Task manager shows Em spending 99% of time
on the folding task, with occasional jumps in SQL Server activity (CPU Time)
to 10, 7,9, etc %.  

I used Task Manager to shut it down.  Shut windows down (just in caseA) and
started it back up.  Opened EM and as soon as I click on the databases
"folder" the hourglass comes up.  More hours later...

Shut EM down again, rebooted and started it back up, same thing.  

Now I am copying the log and pasting it back in so I can look at it (can't
open the log itself) and it says 

Spid11 Recovery of database 'Conduit' (7) is 28% complete (approx 2216 more
seconds) (Phase 3 of 3)

Soo... 37 minutes to go.

It appears that the db is being recovered.  The question is, WTF?  4 hours
(and not finished) to convert a field to another datatype?  Can I just
delete the field and recreate it (assuming the repair works)?  It had no
data in it.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/





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