Microsoft KB Archive/239097

= PRB: Error 601 Occurs When Accessing a Database =

Article ID: 239097

Article Last Modified on 10/3/2003

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q239097



SYMPTOMS
When attempting to access a database or trying to run a query, you may receive the following error message:

Error : 601, Severity: 21, State: 1

Descriptor for system table '%Id' in database '%d' not found in the descriptor hash table.



CAUSE
This error indicates that the in-memory structure used by SQL Server to access a system table has been reused. Usually, only user-table descriptors are reused; system table descriptors are always in memory.



WORKAROUND
To work around this problem, shut down and restart SQL Server. This should temporarily alleviate the error 601; however, an underlying problem may still exist. To troubleshoot this problem, do the following:  Examine the error logs and the parameters of sp_configure for additional information. Look for warnings indicating that open objects and open databases may be set too low. Look at the settings for memory, open objects, and open databases and increase them if they are not appropriate for the amount of physical memory, number of databases, and number of objects. For more information on how to determine the memory overhead for connections, objects, locks and databases, see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

160234 INF: Memory Overhead for Connections, Objects, Locks, and DBs

 Also run DBCC CHECKDB, DBCC NEWALLOC, and DBCC CHECKCATALOG to verify that there are no structural problems in the database that may have caused the error.