INF: Meaning of USER ATTENTION SIGNAL Error

ID: Q96234

The information in this article applies to:

SUMMARY

A backup scheduled from SQL Administrator may fail, leaving the following message in the backup history: 


   DUMP DATABASE has been interrupted by a USER ATTENTION SIGNAL


MORE INFORMATION

The USER ATTENTION SIGNAL error is generated when the SQL Monitor times out while waiting for a reply to a command it has sent to Microsoft SQL Server.

The OS/2 SQL Monitor timeout interval is set by the /sqltimeout or -O parameter. Refer to page 7 of the "SQL Administrator for Windows User's Guide" for more information, or query on the following words in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 


   monitor and sql and administrator and advantage

For the Windows NT SQL Monitor, the timeout is controlled by the following key in the Windows NT Registry: 

HKEY-LOCAL-MACHINE
 SOFTWARE
   MICROSOFT
     SQLSERVER
        SQLMONITOR
           PARAMETERS
                SqlTimeOut

Page 133 of the Microsoft SQL Server "Configuration Guide" states that this value is in hexadecimal seconds; however, this is a documentation error. The value should be entered in decimal seconds and needs to be long enough to cover the longest dump you may run.

The timeout parameter has a default of 180 seconds. If the backup history begins showing USER ATTENTION SIGNAL errors, find out the length of time a dump of the associated entity normally takes and increase the timeout parameter to cover that time period.

Additional query words: Windows NT 


Keywords          : kbother SSrvMon SSrvWinNT 
Version           : 4.2 | 4.2
Platform          : OS/2 WINDOWS 
Issue type        :

Last Reviewed: March 16, 1999