Roman Rehak

Presenting at Montreal SQL Server User Group

2011-05-23T18:11:00Z

Tomorrow (5/24) I will be presenting at the Montreal SQL Server User Group meeting. It's a double topic presentation - Introduction to SQL Azure, and SQL Server Reporting Services Programming . It's the usual meeting place, the Microsoft building at 6:30. Hope to see you there. Attention - la présentation sera en anglais...(read more)

SQL Saturday #59 followup

2010-11-22T04:15:00Z

My session at SQL Saturday #59 went great, the room was packed with people sitting on the floor. The only thing I didn't like was that I had to compress 75 minutes to 50. My apologies to Allan Hirt for not getting out quickly, I got a little carried away when I was approached by people asking questions, including a guy from my native Slovakia. My session materials can be downloaded from the SQL Saturday schedule website . It is not exactly intuitive, but available session downloads can be identified...(read more)

Speaking at SQL Saturday #59 in New York City

2010-11-19T02:10:00Z

I will be presenting this weekend at SQL Saturday #59 in NYC, doing my favorite session SQL Server Development Tips and Tricks. The schedule for this event looks very good. Looks like the event is "sold out" so I expect pretty good attendance, especially since I am doing the only developer oriented session in my time slot. The forecast is as good as I can expect this time of year (no snow, mid 30s temperatures) so I will be going on the bike, newly equipped with a larger windscreen to shield me from...(read more)

PASS 2010 afterthoughts

2010-11-15T21:31:00Z

Last week I was in Seattle at PASS, just like everyone else that's at least remotely interested in SQL Server. Here is a collection of miscellanous thoughts and observations: - This was my summit #10. I still recall my first PASS ten years ago in San Francisco. It was very small compared to this one and SQL Server was still not taken seriously in the enterprise world. How much has changed in 10 years... - Speaking of changes, Kevin Kline hasn't changed a bit in 10 years. That's one advantage of your...(read more)

Moving SQL Server aliases to another computer

2010-11-07T20:06:00Z

I utilize SQL Server aliases a lot, especially since for some reason I don't get name resolution on our network over VPN. So I typicaly create an alias and map the name to the IP address of each SQL Server I use a lot on the network. I am in the process of setting up a new laptop and I was going to start recreating them. Then I remembered that since aliases are stored as registry values, I could use the registry import/export feature. I wasn't sure if it would work between Windows Server 2003 and...(read more)

SQL Azure free trial extended till March 31st 2011

2010-11-04T15:05:00Z

If you are interested in checking out SQL Azure for free, they just extended the trial period till 3/31/2011. What it boils down to is that you get to have a 1GB web database free of charge for 3 months, Good deal if you want to evaluate what this Azure fuss is all about. If you exceed your allowance, you will get charged, but they do it in daily increments. I created a second database and kept it around for a day, I received a hefty bill of $0.10. Considering it ran as a credit card transaction,...(read more)

Issues with 2008 to R2 upgrade

2010-10-28T16:34:00Z

I was recently upgrading a production server to R2 and it turned out to be a fairly frustrating, and in the end unsuccessful experience. This was the Standard Edition. The installer popped a message and said that the system needed to be rebooted due to some leftover files from the previous install. After I clicked OK, the install continued. Not what I would've expected. At the end I got a warning that the upgrade failed. I rebooted and examined the server, all the shared components and Management...(read more)

SQL Saturday #39 in NYC

2010-04-21T01:06:00Z

This weekend I will be speaking at the NYC SQL Saturday . The whole event was supposed to be BI focused but now the schedule shows a lot of non BI stuff as well. I will be presenting SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Programming , one of my favorite topics to present on. It seems that the event is fully booked. I'll be coming down on my bike taking scenic roads through MA and CT so I will not make it to the speaker dinner. But the forecast looks good so I am pretty psyched to finally venture out...(read more)

SQL Saturday Boston 2010

2010-01-31T14:49:00Z

Yesterday I presented my "SQL Server Development Tips and Tricks" session at SQL Saturday #34 in Boston. Here are some of my thoughts and observations: I've been crazy busy the last two weeks and only got some time to work on my session Friday evening. I've done this presentation many times so I wasn't worried but it still pays to make sure all the demos are working and re-learn what all the starting points for the demos need to be, things like "delete these objects" or "create a blank database first"....(read more)

Your work may not be lost

2010-01-28T15:22:00Z

One of the things that I found dissapointing in Management Studio 2008 is that in the event of a crash (and in addition to crashing in the first place), is that on a restart it doesn't show me a dialog with a list of auto-saved files, like my SSMS 2005 did. Yesterday as I was doing some houskeeping on my disk, I noticed a Backup folder under My Documents\SQL Server Managamnet Studio. I looked to see what's there and I saw a bunch of ~AutoRecover.~vs*.sql files, one for each query window in SSMS I...(read more)

OT: Corrupted Outlook file

2009-11-13T18:10:00Z

This is not a SQL Server post but it might be beneficial to some of you. Over the last few months I've been having huge issues with Outlook 2007. Aside from running like molasses on a cold day, it consistently crashes a few times a week. Instaling the hotfix fixed things for a while, then the bad behavior came back. Last week it would just hang and never open, totally using up all the resources to the point where it took me 4 minutes to kill the process. I ran the SCANPST.EXE utility to fix it but...(read more)

Backup compression no longer Enterprise edition only

2009-11-11T23:10:00Z

Last week at PASS I had a discussion with a program manager on the SQL Server team and he told me that in SQL Server 2008 R2, backup compression will be available in the Standard edition. I suspect this announcement will leave many of you very happy. It is certainly good news for my company since we have quite a few auncilary servers with large databases, but not critical enough to justify enterprise licenses. For more details about feature breakdawn in R2, look here - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2-editions.aspx...(read more)

PASS 2009 recap

2009-11-07T22:33:00Z

This week I was at PASS just like many other folks from here. Good times as always, although less partying than in the past. Since I am still in recovery and relying on Percoset to get me through the day, I was wiped every evening. Here are a few thoughts and observations: - I salute PASS marketing for being able to keep the number of registrations as high as they did in this economy. On the other hand - if you are not going to give attendees a free drink or two during the Welcome Reception, then...(read more)

Issue with restoring 2000 backups on 2008

2009-11-02T19:22:00Z

Recently we've been experiencing a lot of headaches with SQL Server 2008 crashing while restoring a backup taken on a SQL Server 2000 production server. The crash resulted in a stack dump but SQL Server would continue running, although less stable, and sooner or later needed a reboot. The error was saw was this: Error: 3414, Severity: 21, State: 1. An error occurred during recovery, preventing the database 'XYZ' (database ID 10) from restarting. Diagnose the recovery errors and fix them, or restore...(read more)

SSRS report rendering from command prompt

2009-06-13T01:53:00Z

A while ago I posted on what now seems to be a defunct blog site, SQL Junkies, a blog about how you can use the RS scripting utility to generate SQL Server Reporting Services reports from command line prompt. In preparation for the DevTeach conference I decided to resurrect it for a demo and since a few things changed between SSRS 2000 and SSRS 2008, it required some work and digging through books online. One of the changes was that starting with SQL Server 2005, Reporting Services provides two separate web service endpoints. The ReportService2005 service is used for management and administrative functions, and the ReportExecution2005 service contains functions related to report rendering. By default, RSS script connects to the management endpoint but in this case since I wanted to use the render function, I needed to connect to the other endpoint. So, the trick here is to use the new endpoint (–e) switch parameter and specify RsExec2005 to use the execution endpoint instead.

Here is a code sample showing rendering from the command prompt, the following DOS command runs the utility against specified report server (-s parameter) and instructs it to execute a file that follows the –I parameter. The third parameter specifies the execution endpoint:

rs -i "c:\temp\reports\Render Report.rss" -s http://rrehak/ReportServer_Katmai -e Exec2005

The RSS utility will render a report (I am using one of the sample Adventure Works reports) and save the rendered file in MS Excel format. The contents of the Render Report.rss file look like this, you may need to modify to match your path to the report:

Public Sub Main()

Dim format as string = "EXCEL"

Dim fileName as String = "C:\temp\reports\Product Line Sales.xls"

Dim reportPath as String = "/AdventureWorks 2008 Sample Reports/Product Line Sales 2008"

' Prepare Render arguments

Dim historyID as string = Nothing

Dim deviceInfo as string = Nothing

Dim extension as string = Nothing

Dim encoding as string

Dim mimeType as string

Dim warnings() AS Warning = Nothing

Dim streamIDs() as string = Nothing

Dim results() as Byte

rs.LoadReport(reportPath, historyID)

results = rs.Render(format, deviceInfo, extension, _

mimeType, encoding, warnings, streamIDs)

' Open a file stream and write out the report

Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenWrite(fileName)

stream.Write(results, 0, results.Length)

stream.Close()

End Sub