I maintain several SQL Servers. For better or worse, all but one of them is still SQL Server 2000. One of them is set up to do a daily DB backup and an hourly transaction backup and has been happily performing these for months. For no particular reason I can determine one of the backup jobs has started failing with the following error:
Executed as user: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM. sqlmaint.exe failed. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 22029). The step failed.
If you Google on this error you’ll find all sorts of Lost Souls fallen victim to it, and all sorts of theories concerning what you should do about it. The most common cause is an attempt to back up transactions when one or more of the listed DBs use the Simple Recovery Model, but there are plenty of people like myself where it just starts happening for God Only Knows what reason.
I will just disable the jobs and create new ones and play around until it yields … but the following comment by a grizzled veteran DBA on one of the private discussion lists sums the situation up pretty well:
The hassle with Error 22029 is that it’s a catch-all — it covers so many different errors that Microsoft should be criticized for such sloppy error documentation in SQL Server 2000.
It *could* have been a login security issue, related to SysAdmin rights — but it can *also* be a disc space issue. It can also refer to a DatabaseMaintenancePlan, and to LogShipping.
These are only *some* of the errors that are indicated by that catch-all message. It’s truly annoying.
By the way — not far removed from this topic — Microsoft has well over 3,000 error messages that are possible in SQL Server 2000 — but in his Error Resolution section there are fewer than 300 Resolutions!
(THAT is the main trouble with Microsoft in general, in my view. Poor documentation. OK, I’m old, and in the old days software groups used to hand out their Design Documentation to Operators. What ever happened to that good, old Western Engineering tradition?)
