Problem​

SQL Server 2005 queries that used to be fast are now rather slow. You've already tuned the query with good indexes and optimized structures. You've checked the running jobs with Activity Monitor and don't see anything that should be slowing down the server. Likewise you've checked the memory and CPU utilization and they don't seem out of line. Did you check the indexes fragmentation? Ah, there's the problem — a highly fragmented index was slowing things down. Is there a way to pre-emptively find and fix these?

Problem​

I have an SSIS package, MyPackage, stored on MyServer in the Package Store. I create an Agent to run the package, running under a SQL account hooked up to a proper proxy and credentials for Windows authentication. Works in development, doesn't work in production: the agent gets the error Connect to SSIS Service on machine "MyServer" failed: Access is denied.

As a Web developer whose formal programming training focused only on console applications and simple GUI apps, it was not immediately obvious to me how to update a (Windows Forms) GUI while a method was still running. Once I decided it was worth the effort to learn how to do so, I was not surprised to find that it is rather easy, using BeginInvoke().

I mentioned using the XML datatype for sparse column support in my recent post on some of the Useful Features in SQL Server 2008. Until today I had never had an opportunity to actually use this feature. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use, especially with some help from Itzik Ben-Gan's Inside SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Programming.

Problem​

I've begun using data-driven subscriptions in SQL Server Reporting Services. I want to create one table to house subscription data. Various reports will have different parameters, both in number and kind. It is impractical to create one column for each possible parameter, and seems senseless to create a separate table for every report.

SQL Server 2008 will be coming out sometime this summer (in theory). At last week's TechFuse (dead link removed; SF 2025) event in Minneapolis, and in blogs I sometimes read, I've started to pick up on a number of useful features and improvements that should make one strongly consider upgrading when the Release to Market (RTM) is ready (certainly this is not all-inclusive):

The last two posts have touched on some issues related to Reporting Services and XML transforms. Now I'll go back and put the pieces together, flesh in some more detail, and try to give a coherent picture of what I was trying to accomplish and how it worked out. Doing so will require a sub-series of posts, call them parts 3.x to the "RS and XSLT" series.

Problem​

A customer has asked for a report, in plain ASCII text, that will contain a header record, a bunch of pipe delimited detail records, and a trailer record. Reporting Services' subscription capabilities are ideal for the report delivery, but does not have any built-in way to support this kind of output. One can use CSV export, but:

Problem​

you try to deploy your xslt file from Visual Studio, and get an error saying "Value for the parameter 'MimeType' is not specified. it is either missing from the function call, or it is set to null".

Solution​

In Solution Explorer, click on the xsl file. Then switch to the Properties pane and enter "text/xml" as the MimeType. Note: this is not required when deploying the xsl through Report Manager's upload button.

It was driving me nuts — my transforms just wouldn't apply. I tried working with some fake data, from my little-used O'Reilly XML in a Nutshell, and that worked fine. So why couldn't I transform my Reporting Services output? After banging my head against this one for a while, I finally decided to mess around with the root <Report ... /> node, first by removing all the extra elements (because my samples did not have any elements in the root node). Voilà, the transform now works. Why is that?

Problem​

periodically, one of my SSIS packages was throwing an error saying "The buffer manager cannot create a temporary storage file on any path in the BufferTempStoragePath property. There is an incorrect file name or no permission." The package in question then would hang, locking a file that it was trying to import.

I was looking at a query today that has an inline expression in it, something similar to

CASE WHEN myTable.myColumn < 5 THEN NULL ELSE myTable.myColumn END

This particular piece of business logic is used in many different places (well, not literally, since I made up a fake example), so I created a UDF to simplify the queries that use this statement. Suppose that UDF is called dbo.fnNulifyMyColumn.