Andrew Calvett

Transaction log backup deadlock

My blog has moved to: http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/acalvett/
The full version of this post can be found here.

Recently we started to see deadlock errors when backing up our transaction logs. The "important" part of the error is shown below.

Could not insert a backup or restore history/detail record in the msdb database. This may indicate a problem with the msdb database. The backup/restore operation was still successful.

What this meant was that the transaction log backup was occurring but the entry in the msdb was not being made as it was being chosen as a deadlock victim so we investigated the cause of the problem as we had some processes that used this information to copy transaction logs to other servers and we needed it to be complete.

We used trace flag 1222 to output the deadlock information to the error log and found the culprit to be a Microsoft stored procedure called "sp_delete_backuphistory" that is called by SQL 2005 maintenance plans when you use the "History cleanup task" and tick the "Backup and Restore History".

To read the complete version of this post go to here.