The Problem

SQL Server is a huge product with lots of moving parts. Bugs happen. Microsoft has a place to voice your issues or problems. They allow you to vote on the issue and then decide when or if it will get fixed. I’ve used Connect when I hit a bug and I have voted on items that were important to me. Recently I hit a bug in sp_createstats. I use this system stored procedure generate statistics in an automated process I’ve got that manages statistics. I added a new vendor database to the system and on the first run hit “Column ‘DAYSOPEN’ in table ‘dbo.TBL_OPPORTUNITY’ cannot be used in an index or statistics or as a partition key because it is non-deterministic.”. Well, we all know you can’t create stats on a computed column! I quickly went to the connect site and someone else had already entered it. The down side was it had so few votes it was only slated to go into the next cumulative update/service pack. When I hit this issue they hadn’t yet announced service pack 4. I already had this procedure coded into my routines and really didn’t want to rewrite them to get past this one problem.

The Solution

!!WARNING!!

By doing what I am about to describe could break at a later date or randomly kill baby kittens.

Since it is a system stored procedure I am loathe to make any changes to it directly. There are ways to modify some system stored procedures but they involve the installation CD and creativity. With that door closed there was only one avenue open to me. Create my own system stored procedure with the fix in it. There is a problem with this solution as well, if it gets dropped due to a service pack or an upgrade anything calling it will break. The first thing I did was to see if the procedure text was available by executing sp_helptext sp_createstats. Luckily it was! Now all I had to do was figure out where it was broken. The procedure is pretty simple and uses some cursors to loop through all the objects and create column statistics where they don’t exist.

declare ms_crs_cnames cursor local for select c.name from sys.columns c  
     where c.object_id = @table_id  
     and (type_name(c.system_type_id) not in ('xml'))  
     and c.name not in (select col_name from #colpostab where col_pos = 1)  
     and ((c.name in (select col_name from #colpostab)) or (@indexonly <> 'INDEXONLY'))
    -- populate temporary table of all (column, index position) tuples for this table  

It was pretty easy to spot. The weren’t checking to see if the column was computed so I added a line to the where clause.

and c.is_computed = 0

That’s it. One little check to see if it is a computed column. Now that I had fixed it I created a new procedure named sp_createstats_fixed in the master database. Just creating it in master doesn’t make it act like the original procedure or make it a system stored procedure. For that I had to execute EXECUTE sp_MS_marksystemobject ‘sp_createstats_fix’. This is an undocumented stored procedure and could change or go way any time. The only way to unmark it in SQL Server 2005 is to drop the procedure and recreate it. Now it acts just like the old procedure. Next I had to replace all references to the old proc with the new one. I made an entry into our bug tracking system about the change so we would have a record of what I did and why.

Conclusions

This wasn’t the most elegant solution. It could break later. The upside is it only took me about 30 minutes to fix and deploy versus the hours of re-coding and then testing that I would have had to do before. Do I think you should go around creating your own system stored procedures? Not at all. I don’t recommend you put anything in the master database period. If the problem had been more complex I would have redone the original routines to exclude the broken procedure. This time it just happened to be a very quick fix to a non-critical part of our system.