Madeira Team
Feb 20, 2014
I don’t like the MERGE statement. The syntax is weird, it’s tricky in terms of locks, and it has a history of weird errors. The other day a developer wanted my help in troubleshooting a MERGE that caused an ACCESS VIOLATION error and a stack dump generation. That led me to tweet this:
It seems the MERGE statement will eventually destroy the universe — Matan Yungman (@MatanYungman) February 11, 2014
I may have exaggerated a bit. It might be limited just to our galaxy (thanks Doc Brown). Anyways, we started troubleshooting and eventually figured out the above error happens because of a specific code section (the whole scenario is dependent on other factors and is very hard to reproduce. We opened a bug and I’ll update when I have more details).
The problematic code block looked like this:
Transact-SQL
DECLARE @Var int = 0;
MERGE TargetTable AS target
USING (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C FROM SourceTable)
AS source (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C)
ON (target.Column_A = source.Column_A)
WHEN MATCHED THEN
UPDATE SET @Var = 1
WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN
INSERT (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C)
VALUES (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C);
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DECLARE @Var int = 0;
MERGE TargetTable AS target
USING (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C FROM SourceTable)
AS source (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C)
ON (target.Column_A = source.Column_A)
WHEN MATCHED THEN
UPDATE SET @Var = 1
WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN
INSERT (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C)
VALUES (Column_A, Column_B, Column_C);
Unlike me, the developer likes MERGE, and what he accomplished here is “Insert where not exists”. But for some reason, updating the variable was problematic.
We started getting alerts about an Availability Group that kept failing. I went to Failover Cluster Manager and saw the Availability Group was offline. I brought it back online, but it failed again almost immediately. I did it a few more times, but the Availability Group refused to stay online.
And then I recalled I once saw a video by Jonathan Kehayias, where he talked about “FailureConditionLevel”, a Windows Cluster configuration option that determines the severity at which there will be a cluster Failover:
0 – No automatic failover
1 – Failover/Restart when the primary node is down
2 – Failover/Restart when the SQL Server service is up but not responding
3 – Failover/Restart on critical errors like a stack dump
4 – Failover/Restart when a resource is unhealthy, for example, memory
5 – Failover/Restart on any qualifying condition and when there’s a query processing error
* Based on the output of sp_server_diagnostics. Click here for a more detailed exaplanation
The value in our cluster was the default – 3. Obviously the cluster kept failing and stayed offline because of the stack dumps generated by the MERGE statement. I changed the value to 1, and the cluster resource stopped failing.
We then moved on to fixing the MERGE code, which was very simple: Omitting the WHEN MATCHED part.
Use caution with MERGE
Dig into your clusters. Know the various options and decide when a Failover is needed