An Unusual R Services Problem

I have had the good luck of having a customer was onboard with SQL Server 2016 very early—like we started testing in March of 2015, and went live in August of 2015. In fact, their home directory refers to vNext instead of 2016. This customer also adopted what felt like most of the new features list. Temporal tables, columnstore, PolyBase, and R Services amongst other features. Anyway, we had R up and running, and it ran for a while.

Recently, and unfortunately I don’t have an exact date on when this started failing (though it was around service pack 1 install time) with the following error:

Error
Msg 39012, Level 16, State 1, Line 10
Unable to communicate with the runtime for ‘R’ script. Please check the requirements of ‘R’ runtime.
STDERR message(s) from external script:
 
DLL ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.MSSQLSERVER1601\MSSQL\Binn\sqlsatellite.dll’ cannot be loaded.
Error in eval(expr, envir, enclos) :
   DLL ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.MSSQLSERVER1601\MSSQL\Binn\sqlsatellite.dll’ cannot be loaded.
Calls: source -> withVisible -> eval -> eval -> .Call
Execution halted
STDOUT message(s) from external script:
 
Failed to load dll ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.MSSQLSERVER1601\MSSQL\Binn\sqlsatellite.dll’ with 182 error.

I troubleshot this with some colleagues at Microsoft and we weren’t able to resolve. We tried a couple of different approaches including reinstalling CU1, but all to no avail. Yesterday, I got on a call with a couple of folks on the product team to try an isolate the problem. We looked at binaries and timestamps and it looked like everything matched up. Then, my friend Arvind Shyamsundar (b|t) suggested we run procmon on the server.

image

There Arvind noticed these odd calls to sqlos.dll in the shared directory. We then looked at add/remove programs and found the following item installed:

Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 8.19.38 AM

The T-SQL compiler service which was a legacy of CTP 2.3 was there, and as soon as we uninstalled our problems went away. So, if you happen to be running on a server that you’ve upgraded since very early versions of SQL Server 2016, you may see this issue.

Just to give credit to Microsoft and the current SQL Server install process, this server has had nearly every release of SQL Server 2016 on it (we’re behind a couple of CUs), and this is the only issue we’ve had. Thanks again to Arvind and UC for solving this tough issue.

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