I’ve been on a sole task today to improve a database performance of the project we’ve been working on. As much as I enjoyed the task there is one thing that costed me quite a bit of head scratching. Being a standard nerd I usually have about 20-30 applications running on my machine at a time, I didn’t immediately associated the error with the tuning advisor but rather assumed it’s one of my other 29 applications/servers/daemons/services in background did something stupid, probably even some of my code craving for a bit of attention, right? So I moved to tune the database on the server via remote desktop, but when I hit a wall there I’ve looked around for the solution and it looks like that it’s been known to MS for almost 2 years now.

Found it hilarious enough though to post it here though :)

“This indicates a bug in your application”, how vicious of them show a dialog like this to a developer. It’s not in MY code you bad thing you! It’s in YOUR code!

The solution or rather a workaround is available here. And NO, you don’t need to restart your computer after applying the change to the registry, just kill and restart Explorer and then start the Tuning advisor again. Make sure to restart the SQL Server Management Studio as well if you’re launching the tuning advisor form it, the setting is applied on app startup.