Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 02/23/07 23:20

The Man (LeJon7881@gmail.com) writes:
> I am in desparate need of assistance. We are using an application
> called PaperVision Enterprise which takes scanned invoices and puts
> them into a database for the purpose of easy reference to any scanned
> invoice in the db. 2 weeks ago while trying to perform a 'match and
> merge' of the newly scanned docs, we received a Run-time error
> '-2147217871 (80040e31)": Timeout expired message. After being told by
> the company who supports this software that they couldn't help me
> since it is using a MS SQL Server Table Lookup I started googling the
> error with minimal success. I am not very proficient with SQL so I'm
> kind of stuck. I have narrowed this down to an ODBC run-time error,
> but looking for some kind of guidance as to how I can resolve it. Any
> info would be greatly appreciated. We are using MS SQL Server 2000.

How much do you pay for that support contract? If you are paying anything
at all, I suggest that you withhold any payments, until they have helped
you with this issue, or sent you a fix.

The error you get is one that happens in the client API. By default
many client API has a command timeout of 30 seconds, which means that
if no data has come back in this time, the client gives up waiting.

There are two possible reasons why this timeout elapses:
1) Blocking.
2) The query takes a long time to run.

Judging from the output you posted, there is no blocking. (The DB
lock you mentioned is perfectly normal. All processes take out a lock
on their current database.)

On the other hand, process 65 appears to be busy. It has a lot of CPU
time accumulated, and I don't like UNKNOWN TOKEN. That's usually a
sign of something performing less well.

So call the vendor again, and be more insistent that they help you
to sort this out. At very least, they should change their app, so
that it sets the command timeout 0, which means wait forever. Then
at least, you would get a result, even if it would take some time.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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