I had a messy (another one) day, last thing I wanted was a “broken” SQL Server instance where I was faced with multiple “service terminated unexpectedly” messages. I thought it would make a decent blog post to share with you all.

Why me?

I came into the office one morning and was faced with the following 3 screen shots.

After much research and messing about I concentrated on the following area where it could not open default language SQLEVN70 resource file, I ended up looking around for a sqlenv70.rll file (located within the folders below), everything just looked ok but obviously it wasn’t.

By this time the error log was being flooded even more with the following messages. The SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER) service terminated unexpectedly 12 time(s).

Maybe I really had to uninstall SQL Server from this instance, I refused to, (my absolute last resort) I don’t know how this happened and I don’t know why I did the following steps, but once I completed the below SQL Server started up.

I refuse to give up

All this applies to my SQL Server 2014 installation.

• Step 1 – I removed cumulative updates (CU) 12.0.5546.0 being the latest build
• Step 2 – I removed Service Pack 2 12.0.5000.0
• (At this point I am back to SP1)
• Step 3 – I installed Service Pack 2
• Step 4 – I installed the recent CU.

Result? Service back on line.

Looking into the error log all I could see were synchronization messages with Resource Database followed by recovery completed messages.

I am still carrying out RCA (Root Cause Analysis) on this – I plan on staying up all night until I get some answers. If I am going to guess, I believe I had missing folders at this location C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Binn\

Either way, I think I will be up because I need to recover this database –  unable to call into the C compiler message. Right, now I am some serious trouble.

At least I can connect to the database engine – it’s a start. In my next blog post I will address the above compiler issue, stay tuned!