Dynamics CRM Import Error “Must declare the scalar variable “@table”

This post is the first in a new series I’m going to call “CRM 2016 Upgrade Adventure”. Summary: my organization has taken on the ambitious challenge of not only upgrading our existing Dynamics CRM 2011 environment to the 2016 version but  of moving it to the cloud service as well. Aside from getting the vanilla components through three versions (2013, 2015, 2016) there are all of the custom integrations that have been tied into CRM over the years that must come along too. That is why it is neither a joke nor hyperbole when I label this as an adventure. We are only in the initial months of this effort and I promise you that plenty of adventure has already been had.

Our first headache… I mean, adventure… was encountered while importing the 2011 database to 2013.  (In order to get to 2016 you have to “hop” your database through 2013, 2015, and 2016 by importing it to each version.) Initially we encountered some messages about incompatible components from the CRM 4.0 days, which our database started out in. That was no surprise. The developers quickly updated our current system and we went to import again assuming the path was clear. What I encountered instead was almost instant failure. Within 20 minutes the import had failed. Knowing this was a process that should take several hours (our database exceeds 1.5TB), I took a look at the logs to see what the issue was. During the stage “Metadata xml upgrade: pass 1” the following was listed:

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. —> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Must declare the scalar variable “@table”.

I’m sure you can appreciate my confusion since this is a closed-source application written by Microsoft in which I have no option to declare variables. Googling only returned articles about people writing their own applications. Feeling we had no other recourse, we opened up a support ticket with Microsoft. That in itself was quite an adventure that spanned two weeks, but I’ll give you the short version. (Props to my coworker John Dalton for his endless hours on the phone with Microsoft through nights and weekends.) In the end the culprit was a trigger that was on our database, but not just any trigger. This one is named “tr_MScdc_ddl_event” and is created by Microsoft when you enable CDC on a database. After scripting out that trigger to make sure we could recreate it later, then dropping it, the import continued past “Metadata xml upgrade: pass 1” successfully.

TLDR version

Microsoft’s database level CDC trigger tr_MScdc_ddl_event interferes with the Dynamics CRM import operation. Drop that trigger before the import it then add it back once it’s finished and you shouldn’t have issues with this error.

So that’s the end of the adventure right? Everything worked fine after that? Not even close! Stay tuned…

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