Deltek Cobra – Error updating RTD file: Sometimes you get one of those errors that you’ve never seen before and for all manner of reasons, the cause takes all day to track down. Try this one for size:
[Error]Error updating RTD file:|Error: Connectivity error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.RATEDESC’ with unique index ‘IX_UNIQUE_RATEDESC’. ODBC Error: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.RATEDESC’ with unique index ‘IX_UNIQUE_RATEDESC’.
This happened during the bulk load of a massive Rates file; a smaller version was mentioned in an earlier blog and went in to Deltek Cobra without a squeak. But once I added about 2000 new records to the file, I got the above error.
Normally, if you have a duplicate record, Deltek Cobra will clearly identifying it as an error, giving you the row numbers and the name of the items it found; something like this:
[Error]Duplicate found for ‘Over worked Eng. Support 10/01/2011’ (Records 75,1143)
For some reason however, Cobra stopped doing that for this particular load and produced the rather verbose ‘RTD file’ error instead. At first it wasn’t clear that duplicates were the cause although the message does allude to a duplicate key. If you ever see this error during a similar process, it is in all likelihood a duplicate record issue. Finding it can be the biggest challenge.
To help you this that last point; I later discovered that if you create a new Rate file into which to load the error producing CSV file, you may get the normal duplicate record errors and that will allow you to fix them quickly and get on with your day. I say ‘may’ because I did try that on the day and got the single RTD file message.
I only discovered this latter possibility when trying to reproduce the error for this blog, and didn’t want to break the now working Rate file again for my customer. So, I created a new test Rate file, but I couldn’t get the mysterious error to appear when loading the same bad file into it. No, instead I got lots and lots of nicely descriptive duplicate record errors – something I could have really done with on Friday when all this was going down; it would have saved me hours of work and head scratching. I’m not a big fan of irony.