Thought Leadership
Microsoft warns of crashes and memory errors under Windows Server 2025. Affected are applications such as SQL Server that use Address Windowing Extensions.
Due to adjustments to the operating system’s memory management, these applications experience access violations with error code 0xC0000005, memory corruption, or unexpected termination processes. Microsoft SQL Server is particularly affected when operated with the Windows policy “Lock Pages in Memory” (LPIM) to prevent paging memory to the hard drive. In affected environments, errors occur during database maintenance operations such as DBCC CHECKDB, followed by unexpected crashes or restarts of SQL Server services.
Windows Server 2025: Patch to be provided later
A permanent patch is still pending and is expected to be delivered in a future Windows update. As a temporary workaround, Microsoft advises administrators to temporarily disable the LPIM policy for the SQL Server service account or turn off AWE in affected programs. However, the company points out that this step can negatively affect database performance and memory behavior.
(Editorial Team)
