SQL Server could not spawn FRunCM thread. Check the SQL Server error log and the Windows event logs for information about possible related problems.

I encountered this error this morning when my SQL Server instance wouldn't start after I made some connection changes yesterday. I had to make the changes because a needed an ODBC connection, and that would only seem to work if I configured it to use named pipes.

After checking the logs, I received the error "SQL Server could not spawn FRunCM thread. Check the SQL Server error log and the Windows event logs for information about possible related problems.".

So, I went back to undo each change I had made, and noticed that the last change I made was to enable VIA as a protocol for my SQL Server instance. Disabled that, and hey presto, SQL Server now starts fine.

The strange thing is that enabling VIA in my SQL Express instance didn't seem to cause the same issue on that server though.

SQL Server Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation.

Today I migrated an exisiting set of tables from one database, to a new database, to isolate their work.

After copying all the stored procs, views, tables and data, one of my stored procs wouldn't run.

Everytime I tried to execute it, I got the error:

"Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation."

It transpires that this error can be caused by many different problems, butt he main one being that the collation types for the columns being joined in the sql statement is different.

In my instance this was not the case, but by telling the columns to use the databases default collation on either side of the join fixed the problem - e.g.

SELECT table1.*, table2.* FROM table1
INNER JOIN table2 ON table1.column1 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT = table2.column1 COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT