DBProcess is dead or not enabled

[Wendy Chia]

Hi! I've a problem that's bugging me for a very long time.

A no of my front-end Powerbuiler applications update&insert about 15K records
to my Microsoft SQL Server 4.21a.

Many a times, I encountered the error msg : DBProcess is dead or not enabled.

A check with Microsoft's Technet (Dec/95) reveals :

======= Begin Cut and Paste ==================================================
This behavior does not occur in versions of DB-Library prior to version
4.21.

STATUS
======

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in DB-Library version 4.21. We
are researching this problem and will post new information here in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION
================

This problem will generally cause the error handler to receive one 10025
error, followed by an endless stream of 10005 errors.

For example:

int err_handler( ... )
{
dberrhandle( NULL );

// .. process error

dberrhandle( err_handler );
}

On OS/2, the error handler is not called endlessly, but the DB-Library call
that caused the initial error to be generated is never returned from.

Additional reference words: 4.21 dbgetuserdata handling handle msg dblib
KBCategory: kbprg
KBSubCategory: SSrvDB_Lib SSrvProg
=============================================================================
Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1995.

======= End Cut and Paste ====================================================

Is there any known workaround or solution to this? Any advise is greatly
appreciated!

Best regards,
Wendy
wc...@scscc1.scsnet.scs.com.sg

[Bill Ekstrand]

The "DBProcess is dead or not enabled message" is a generic error that
means the client has lost its connection to the db server. There are
lots of conditions that can cause this to happen, from network problems
to timeout problems to server down problems. Have you checked the SQL
Server error log to see if there's a corresponding error on the server
end? A likely message on the server side might be something like 'unable
to write to ListenOn connection...' followed by 'the pipe is being
closed', or maybe 'a network error has been encountered while sending
results to the front end'. This means the server tried to send something
back the client, but the client was gone.

We used to get these types of conditions on our PowerBuilder/SQL Server
apps when the PB apps sent long running queries to the server (complex
stored procedures, large updates, etc.). In that case, we were running
Windows 3.1 with LanMan 2.1a network drivers on the client. The network
client driver would drop the connection if the server didn't respond
within 45 seconds as a default. There was a parameter in the lanman.ini
file (sesstimeout in the workstation section) that could be added to
override this default. This problem went away when we switched to WFW
3.11 on the client and NT on the server side. I'm not sure what your
network environment is, but you might look for a similar network timeout
problem.

Bill Ekstrand