Since most of us, especially on Neowin, use all our operating systems including Windows, Android, and their associated applications in English, we tend to forget that there are many regions which are not that well-versed in this particular language. Such audience segments typically use localized versions of software. Now, Microsoft has shared a mitigation for a SQL Server-related issue primarily affecting its Japanese customers.
Basically, people who have installed the Japanese version of SQL Server will notice that the output from bcp.exe is starting to output messages in the English language rather than Japanese language. For those unaware, bcp.exe is bulk copy command line utility, which does exactly what it says on the tin: that is, working in tandem with SQL Server to bulk copy data from a SQL Server instance to a user-specified file format.
Microsoft has explained that this problem occurs because the SQL Server update contains a fix for the ODBC driver, but installer for the Japanese version was accidentally uploaded in the English language, and consequently, "the Japanese resource file for the ODBC driver is deleted during the update process".
The mitigation for this annoyance is fairly manual unfortunately. You"ll need to download the Japanese variant of the ODBC Driver version 17.10.6.1 from Microsoft"s website here. Your downloaded file should be called msodbcsql.msi, and provided that is stored in the C:\temp directory, run the following command in Command Prompt with admin privileges:
msiexec /a "C:\temp\msodbcsql.msi" /qb targetdir="C:\temp\msodbcsql_msi" After this, copy the resultant msodbcsqlr17.rll file to the C:\Windows\System32\1041 directory. If it does not exist, you should create this folder yourself. This should get bcp.exe displaying outputs in the Japanese language. It"s unfortunate that there isn"t an automated mitigation to resolve this issue, but at least Microsoft has shared detailed remediation steps. You can find instructions in Japanese language in Microsoft"s blog post here too.