This blog is part of my series Making Data Tell a Story With SSRS Properties. Today I have a special guest blogger: Stacia Misner, Business Intelligence consultant, trainer, author, and speaker extraordinaire. She is one of the people I learned much from when I started working with SSRS, and it has been a pleasure to get to know her over the past few years. Today, she is blogging about RepeatWith.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
I like to use BULK INSERT or bcp as much as possible, this is especially true if all I need to do is dump the file into a table. For more complex things I will go the SSIS route. Files are generated by all kinds of systems these days, these can be Windows, *nix, Mac, Amiga and other systems. Make sure to use something other than notepad when dealing with these files and you want to look at them.
One of my favorite movie quotes comes from Under Siege 2 (slightly altered to avoid cursing): “Assumption is the mother of all screw ups”. Before we go any further, if you are ever unsure about SQL Server Licensing, contact Microsoft (1-800-426-9400 open Monday through Friday 6:00 AM PST to 6:00 PM PST). What is valid for me at this point in time may not be valid for you or even for myself at a different point in time.
This blog is part of my series Making Data Tell a Story With SSRS Properties. Property: WritingMode The purpose of this property is to allow you to display text horizontally or vertically within a text box or tablix cell. To access the property, select the text box and go to WritingMode. The options are Horizontal, Vertical, and Rotate270. Modes Horizontal: Text will be horizontal, read left to right. Vertical: Text will be vertical, read top to bottom.
Sometimes you want to quickly see how many files a database has, how much space a file is using and how much space is free. You can use the sysfiles/sys.files views or compatible views for that. From SQL Server 2005 onward you can also use the sys.database_files catalog view. The sizes in these files are stored in 8k pages, in order to get the size in MB you need to divide by 128.
When creating reports, I try to keep them simple, clean and with as little information as possible. What I mean by as little information as possible is that I try to keep the information summarized so that the value of the report isn’t lost in a sea of details. However, for some reports you still need those details to back up the summary and to allow for digging deeper into issues.
This blog is part of my series Making Data Tell a Story With SSRS Properties. Property: Document Map The purpose of this property is to allow you to create a clickable list of values in a pane on the left side of the screen that a user can click on to quickly reach that value in the report. To access the property, select the table or matrix and go to DocumentMapLabel.
This blog is part of my series Making Data Tell a Story With SSRS Properties. Property: NoRowsMessage The purpose of this property is to display a specific message when no rows are returned from a dataset to be displayed in a table, matrix, or list. To access the property, select the data region and go to NoRowsMessage. Example: I have a report that shows sales by territory by year. It has a parameter for the order year.
Or in other words, what do I need to install during SQL Server setup in order to end up with a fully operational SSIS server with a minimal surface area configuration? I came up with this blog post after I participated in the following thread at the MSDN forum: "What's the minimum configuration to run dtexec on windows 2003 server?" DTEXEC is the command line utility used behind the scenes to run SSIS packages.
The basic Azure Worker Role consists of a run method, an endless loop, and a sleep statement. Earlier this week, Magnus Martensson walked through implementing a more sophisticated wait object than the generic Thread.Sleep call. Which reminded me of a problem inherent in the basic Microsoft template. Every exit is a crash. The basic Worker Role is a while(true) statement that alternates between doing work and sleeping for a period of time.