Interesting case - part 2

In my previous post I told you about the medical institute having problems. Yesterday their server has crashed again. One could wonder why some of us consider this a good thing, well a problem that repeats it self has a better chance to be solved than one that occurs only once.

I was out of office so my colleague got the dump file and the output was exactly the same. Then we compared the cause and the configuration (sorry to stay vague but I think it is bad practice to name customers and their configuration on my blog) and it seems that Windows has only 2 GB and everything else was dedicated to SQL.

It is fine to dedicate a whole lot of memory to your database server process but the OS has got to breath too.

One of the other problems is that they have only one server and every database in the institute is on it and they expect it to be high available. I proposed that they contacted their sales contact and he would come by with a specialized sales since databases that are high available and the rest is strictly useless.

Interesting case

Today I had to be in a medical instituate where there has been a server crash a week ago and now I had to look at the server.

The SQL server has produced a minidump so a post about the SQL minidump will be in the near future on this blog :).

There are a huge amount of errors, i'll have to analyse them and will write about something about them as well.

The third topic i'll have to do some research on is windows 2003 (64-bit) paging, since their crash there is a huge amount of paging.