One of those annoying things about the US is they use different paper sizes to us Brits. US Letter is 215.9 by 279.4 mm (8.5 by 11.0 inches) The UK equivalent, A4, is 210 by 297 mm (8.26 by 11.69 inches) One of our customers is based in the UK but has remote sales offices in the US, so their SSRS report are set to A4 and when they printed them in the US offices, the footer is cut off....
Today’s Windows Insider email included a few new cool features, here are my Top 3 Do more at once with the new Compact Overlay window. Keep watching a movie or video chat on one corner of your screen — even when switching apps to check email or browse the web. When an app window enters compact overlay mode, it’ll be shown above other windows so it won’t get blocked. Look for updates to the Movies & TV app and Skype Preview app to take advantage of this feature in the near future....
I’ve been getting errors with MSSQL server on Ubuntu on Windows 10. The error, Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory dpkg: error processing package mssql-server (–remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu5) … E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I managed to fix it in the end by Of course, you should try uninstalling correctly first, which is latter of the two...
I’ve had a problem recently when it can to formatting a datetime as just date where FormatDateTime didn’t work The fix was to change it to Format. Oddly, despite the parameter being a datetime, I found I still had to cast it as a date. FormatDateTime was introduced in Vs 2008. I’m not 100% sure why this didn’t work.
Another error I hit Warning 1 [rsRuntimeErrorInExpression] The Value expression for the textrun ‘Textbox28.Paragraphs[0].TextRuns[0]’ contains an error: Overload resolution failed because no Public ‘/’ can be called with these arguments: ‘Public Shared Operator /(d1 As Decimal, d2 As Decimal) As Decimal’: Argument matching parameter ‘d2’ cannot convert from ‘TextBoxImpl’ to ‘Decimal’. C:\Projects\Reports\1. Report.rdl Thankfully Google found Qiuyun answer. I was missing the .Value at the end. So (wrong) =ReportItems!Textbox1 Fixed (working)...
In case you haven’t heard, I’ve started a new job and one of my first tasks was to speed up a SSRS report. One of the first issues I stumbled across was this: An error occurred during local report processing. The definition of the report ‘/1. Report’ is invalid. The Value expression for the textrun ‘Tx412.Paragraphs[0].TextRuns[0]’ contains an error: [BC30456] ‘RdlObjectModel’ is not a member of ‘ReportingServices’ Looking into it the issue it appears its expanded expressions when it got copied – it’s basically making the it fully qualified....
For the past 4 months I’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 rather then Visual Studio 2013 and yesterday, I hit a bug with SSRS (shows how much I love SSRS). The bug appeared when it came to deployment The error was deploying SSRS report Exception calling “CreateCatalogItem” with “7” argument(s): “The definition of this report is not valid or supported by this version of Reporting Services. The report definition may have been created with a later version of Reporting...
I recently had incident logged where the drive that hosted SSISDB database filled up on the UAT environment. We had SSISDB set to only keep 2 copies of the projects, however the additional copies are only removed when the SQL job is run – SSIS Server Maintenance job. The SQL job is scheduled to run at 00:00 (midnight) every day, which is the default, which runs two steps SSIS Server Operation Records Maintenance...
Distribution list are amazing things, they allow us to send mail to our team without having to remember who exactly is in our team, this is especial true in this modern age where we are part of many different teams, sometimes without even realising. These lists can contain hundreds or even thousands of members and the latest NHS IT bug has left IT departments maybe wanting to double-check their distribution lists – hopefully before the security team comes a knocking....
One of the annoying things about working with multiple languages is they each have their differences – obviously, otherwise there would only be 1 language! Although there is good reason to have these differences they still have elements that are a pain. One of the most annoying things, other then “do you require a semicolon at the end of the statement?” is comments. Comments aren’t executed or complied but they help developers read code....
With rise of the internet high street businesses are rushing to adapt so they don’t become a thing of the past. However in their rush are they being a storm trooper? Are they missing the point? First, lets look at two successful hybrid business. Hughes, a electrical store based in East Anglia and Argos, a British catalogue retailer operating in the United Kingdom. If we focus on Argos as its more well known business....
So one of the really nice sponsors at SQL Saturday had a vending machine that was rigged up to release a treat when you sent a tweet. Like so I'm at #sqlsatcambridge home of @redgate #redgatetreat #red668 — Matt Smith (@matt40k) September 10, 2016 and give you… In mine had a SQL Prompt license. At first I was a bit disappointed, I hoping for SQL Test license or a full blown SQL toolbelt but the more I’ve been using it, the more I’m loving it....
https://twitter.com/matt40k/710468378050339000 It’s nice to see Microsoft fixing old bugs – the I noticed today they updated the MSDN article about Actions in Multidimensional Models. It now supports HTTPS! Woot!! https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/692837/cannot-specify-https-in-an-analysis-services-report-action
Unfortunately this year I’ve not been able to make any of the pre-cons, however the (free) community day looks epic – the hardest part is going to be selecting which session to attend, the final one looking the worst. Aghhh!!! I’m going to have to roll a dice or something! CDC – Change Data Capture in Detail Uwe Ricken What’s new in the SQL Server 2016 for a BI Professional...
Today one of our older SSIS packages failed which loads data into our warehouse, it turns out one of the fields had been expanded as the business had started to use a different standard for one of the codes. Despite not being told about this, it causing it fail and generate extra work on an already busy Monday it was actually a really good thing. Firstly, once we identified the problem (and fixed it), our main business contact was aware of it, was able to explain why it was happening....
Over the summer holidays I got my son to create a spreadsheet detailing some of his toy cars which we then imported into PowerBI. Created by a 7 year old in under an hour
Updated 10/10/2016 – Added Map using the new Shapes option in PowerBI. Every School in England regularly publish data to the Department of Education and Graham Reed has published a spreadsheet of the software each school used to submit their returns. Below is a PowerBI report I’ve created based on his data. You can also access by clicking here
So yesterday I was playing with PowerBI and I hit a problem. As you can see, the x-axis is wrong. For some reason it wasn’t creating the correct range. After a little while I thought I’d try out Microsoft’s feedback option – the smiley faces – in the top menu you have a smiley face. Click it, then you can send feedback. Sure enough after a little while, Justin Schneider from the Power BI team replied asking a few more questions – basically asking me to check the data was correct, which was in this case and even offered a solution....
Back in SQL Server 2008 Microsoft introduced auditing, specifically the Database Audit Specification. It’s pretty good – despite the title I do actually think its nice feature, it pretty much works and doesn’t have much of a performance impact, my problem is not much love has gone into it since it was released in SQL2008. It claims to meet various regulations such as the EU data Protection Directive, HIPAA, PCI DSS and to be fair, I’m sure it does....
One of the annoy parts of building a warehouse is building the staging database, its an important first step. The staging database is replica of the source systems. BIML can provide away to accelerate this process, however its not perfect. BIML is designed to create SSIS packages – and it does this very, very, well. SQL database objects, not so well. SSDT does this well. The first step in the designing a warehouse is discovery, Azure Data Catalog is an excellent tool for doing the discovery, it allows you to connect to a wide array of data source types and gather the meta data that can be used to build the staging database....
The Power Query Formula Language (informally known as “M”) is a powerful mashup query language optimized for building queries that mashup data. It is a functional, case sensitive language similar to F#, which can be used with Power Query in Excel and Power BI Desktop. A few days ago I got asked to produce a list of users (and their email address) in a number of AD Groups. I already had a SSIS package that had a script task to pull this data from Active Directory and push it into a SQL database and we have a PowerShell script to get the same data in our code repo....
Today my colleague had a problem opening our BI solution, the solution had multiple projects, including 3 SSDT projects. Although the project builds correctly on both my machine, the build machine and another colleague machine it refused to build stating that the reference to the object in another project was invalid. After thinking for a few moments, I remembered I had seem this before. The problem was a bug in SSDT....
Microsoft has released SQL Server 2016 Developer, for free. That’s right, zero, zip, nothing. Completely free. The developer edition is fully featured, it contains the same goodness as the $$$ Enterprise edition. The catch? Its not for production.
Another day, another reference to an old Jamie Thomson blog post – today it was getting the ConnectionString to output to the information. Admittedly I wasn’t looking for how to fire the connection string into an information event, just the ConnectionString, still another great idea and its useful for debugging.
This month saw the release of SQL Server 2016, which from a BI\Report point of view is huge. Once we had access to it yeah, already been on msdn. Can't believe we're being made to wait!!! — Dave Kerby (@davekerby) June 1, 2016 I spotted something odd. So whats the diff? Enterprise is only core licensed - https://t.co/2NgZG7siUD #sqlhelp @sqlserver @SQLServerBI pic.twitter.com/SP8OC5eLvD — Matt Smith (@matt40k) June 6, 2016 Now, in SQL Server terms there are two types of licensing...