:: 20-Mar-1999 06:17 (Saturday) ::
The stats update this evening failed. Apparently a few days ago we got
hit by a bug that has happened once before. When adding in the brand-new
emails into the participants table, for some reason the identity column
(that becomes your ID number) goes nuts and starts incrementing wildly.
Newly-assigned ID numbers should be in the 160000 range, but recent new
emails have been assigned IDs in excess of 10000000. This causes an
overflow when updating the master tables because the primary
RC5_64_master table only has 7 digits allocated for the id field.
Correcting the problem is not difficult, but it’s a lengthy, manual
process and I don’t feel comfortable going through it when I’m tired.
I’ll have to manually re-assign the bad ID values and then manually
correct the ID numbers in the master table.
I’m still not certain what causes this to occur. At the very least I’ll
want to add code to the daily update routine that will detect if this
happens again so the error can be corrected in a more timely manner.
I did re-run an “update statistics” on the participants table today,
which is not something I normally do. It’s possible that this activity
is related to the error.
Sorry that the 19-Mar stats are delayed. All the data are fine and no
blocks have been lost. Look for the numbers to be re-run sometime
tomorrow.
Thanks for your patience.