JIRA crashed - issue updates lost (10 days backwards)

Question

hi,

Just today I had the following issue: JIRA started working slow until at a moment it didn't respond at all. Having had this before I tried to stop the "Atlassian JIRA" service. This usually takes about 15 minutes in my environment. I usually check the existence of the "tomcat7w.exe" process in the list of active processes and after a 25 minutes wait I decided to restart the entire server as I wasn't sure that the process was actually doing something (server activity was at 0%-2%).

After the server restart some people mentioned me that issues, they had closed at least 15 days ago had returned to the "in progress" status and the issue activity log doesn't show any inconsistent activity with the issue's status.

Here's my question: how does JIRA handle crashes and database transactions? Is it possible that transactions are held in a temporary db for such a long period of time? And that they can get lost if JIRA abruptly crashes?

Is there any way I can trace back what might have happened?

We're using:

* JIRA 5.2.10
* Windows 2008
* MS-SQL 2008

Any guidance is welcome.

thanks!

Jacques.

Jacques · Answer

Hey Alexej,

what none-JIRA "database" updates are performed that would update the "UPDATED" field?

A "resolved" issue would definitely be in the [changeitem] table. No?

Alexej Geldt · Answer

@Jacques

not every issue update is historized.

The UPDATED field holds timestamp whenever the issue is updated in the database, not neccessaraly inside jira.

Jacques · Answer

hi Jamie,

I've restored the database before the crash and have discovered (only mentioning one issue here, but goes for various):

* The "UPDATED" field in [jiraissue] table is set to "2013-07-01 13:16"
* for this same issue, the latest entry in the[changeitem] table for this same issue is set to "2013-06-21 09:38:11"

Isn't this strange? Shouldn't both date/time values be the same? Or are there changes to a ticket that aren't registered in the [changeitem] table which make the "UPDATED" field?

Since JIRA seems to handle SQL updates through transactions I'm thinking that some of them might have been stored in memory (or tempdb) and when rebooting the server the SQL service didn't have the time to write all these transactions to disk.

Nevertheless: I'm not a SQL guru and it seems very strange that this would have happened.

Any other suggestion you might think of?

thanks!