Symptoms
When you run a non-component VSS backup (for example, by using Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Agent) against volumes of servers hosting SQL Server 2016 instances, the backup jobs may report failure with the following events logged in the Application Event log.
Operation:
PrepareForSnapshot Event
Context:
Execution Context: Writer
Writer Class Id: ID
Writer Name: SqlServerWriter
Writer Instance Name: Microsoft SQL Server 2016:SQLWriter
Writer Instance ID: ID
Command Line: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared\sqlwriter.exe"
Process ID: PID
Error: Source:SQLWriter, Event ID:EventID
Sqllib error: OLEDB Error encountered calling ICommandText::Execute. hr = 0x80040e14. SQLSTATE: 42000, Native Error: 102
Error state: 1, Severity: 15
Source: Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 11.0
Error message: Incorrect syntax near '.'.
If you are using Azure Site Recovery, then the Replication Health will show Critical status under the Severity column for the affected instances and the Replication Health Errors in the Dashboard show the following error:
VSS writer SQLServerWriter failed with error 0x800423f4 during After DoSnapshotSet phase on the source machine.
Note
The option to request non-component backup belongs to the VSS requestor application and is usually not visible to the user. An example of application requesting such backups is Azure VM backup agent.
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
Resolution
This issue is fixed in the following cumulative update for SQL Server:
About cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Each new cumulative update for SQL Server contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous cumulative update. Check out the latest cumulative updates for SQL Server:
References
Learn about the terminology that Microsoft uses to describe software updates.
