CI_Item VI job hangs
I'm just throwing this out there in case it saves someone time and headache in the future.
the client I upgraded from version 4.1 to 2018 was recreating their import job into CI_Item. They called and showed me that the import job just hangs. they could test the job and all records test fine and no failures or failed fields but as soon as they actually tried the import the VI job just hung showing record 0 . having a test work but then records fail during import is not that unusual but since the job just hung up and never did anything, I had little to go on.
After about 45 minutes of troubleshooting I finally realized it was hanging on the first item, and their first item had an extended description. That lead me to look at CI_ExtendedDescription table and sure enough there was one record with CHARACTERS in the ExtendedDescriptionKey field which is required to be numeric (but previous versions allowed characters). I'm certain it was hanging when trying to increment that field by 1. We removed that record from CI_ExtendedDescription table and the import works fine now