Before you bring an engine online or offline, check the status of the engines that are currently running. sysengines includes any of the following in the status column:
online – indicates the engine is online.
in offline – indicates that sp_engine offline has been run. The engine is still allocated to the server, but is having its tasks migrated to other engines.
in destroy – indicates that all tasks have successfully migrated off the engine, and that the server is waiting on the OS-level task to deallocate the engine.
in create – indicates that an engine is being brought online.
dormant – indicates that sp_engine offline was not able to migrate all tasks from that engine. If the tasks terminate themselves (through a timeout), engines switch to being permanently offline. Dormant engines process only those tasks that are causing the dormant state; they are not available to work on any other tasks.
select engine, status, affinitied, starttime from sysengines
engine status affinitied starttime ------ ------------ ----------- -------------------------- 0 online 12 Mar 5 2007 9:40PM 1 online 9 Mar 5 2007 9:41PM 2 online 12 Mar 5 2007 9:41PM 3 online 14 Mar 5 2007 9:51PM 4 online 8 Mar 5 2007 9:51PM 5 in offline 10 Mar 5 2007 9:51PM