Sqlserver.exe has stopped working

Question

Since installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 I have been getting the below error. It happens only when Visual Studio 2015 is open and happens whether I am running as a local

Answer 1

There is an ongoing thread about this crash on Microsoft's MSDN forum:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/0c486ed7-9fdb-45f0-9fcd-342eadbb0476/sqlserverexe-crashing

Apparently, this crash occurs after upgrading to the most recent version of SSDT (14.0.60525.0).

A Microsoft employee suggested this as a fix:

We've investigated and believe that this happens when the query store feature is enabled in any database in the localdb server. You can work around this problem by disabling the query store feature in all localdb database instances. To find the names of databases that have query store enabled, run this query:

select [name] from sys.databases where is_query_store_on=1

Then for each database, disable query store by executing a query like so:

alter database DBNAME set query_store=off

Some reported this did not fix the issue for them, others that it did, so your success may vary.

See Microsoft employee Kevin Cunnane's comment below:

The fixed LocalDB.msi is included in the August release - available from msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt204009.aspx with update via the Visual Studio Extensions and Updates channel due in the next few weeks.