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MS Reporting Services – Dynamic SQL
Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to use and get my head around Microsoft Reporting Services. As with all new products, it takes a while to start to understand the feature-set of the product and how to work-around some of the limitations.
The power of SQL Reporting Services is the ability to create and deploy reports that end-users can consume and refine if necessary, without giving them direct access to the database. It also make sense that these same end-users can refine datasets as required before exporting to MS Excel.
In my case, I wanted to provide an easy way for users to be able to modify some of the search logic for a given report once published out i.e. Ability to select a search field, basic logic to search on and required search value. In order to do this, I had to convert the SQL within the dataset into ‘Dynamic SQL’. This small tutorial will take you through the steps of how to do this using the MS AdventureWorks Database.
On a side note, I am also testing out ScreenSteps Pro, which helps in the production of documentation and publication. It looks pretty good so far!
Playstation Welcome Back–Missing Games
After over a month of waiting for the network to come back up, and days of trying to log into it just to receive error messages, I finally managed to login and checkout the Welcome Back Offer. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of downloading the welcome back offer (yes it is downloadable) just to realise that then removed all my options to download the free games!
So, whether or not this is a result of what I did or a system wide bug, I am not sure. Will do a bit of searching and find out what is going on. I did however manage to join up for the 30 day free playstation plus offer.
Update:
Thanks to DryEarth.com for posting up a workaround to this problem – http://www.dryearth.com/playstation-welcome-back-missing-free-game/
Have to access from the playstation account management section. Logical… See link above for detailed instructions.
Legal Document & Legal Forms
Depending on your occupation or circumstances, at times it will be necessary to source and complete a legal document. Whether it be a will and testament, the creation of a trust dead or simply a loan agreement, these are all legal documents. The Internet has numerous sites that deal with legal documents and it can be a daunting undertaking to determine good from bad documents. Over the coming months, I will start looking at different legal document sites, their technology and what to look for in online legal documents and forms.
Integration Services – Multiple Environments
Best Practice with version control of DB schemas..
So I am currently working a Microsoft data integration project (more on that later). For the first time, we have setup multiple SSIS environments to mirror that of our production database environments, i.e. Development, Test and Production. I am currently using Visual Studio 2010 to manage database changes (via a database project). All source code is version controlled via TFS.
At the moment, if I make any changes to the development SSIS database, I do so directly through SQL Server Management Studio. Within VS 2010, I then perform a schema compare against the Project schema and update the project schema with any changes.
Once packages have been deployed and tested, on Development, I build and deploy my database solution out to test and production.
This process while it works seems to be a little combersome. I was wondering if anyone out there reading this, has experience in managing multiple database instance using VS, and how they manage schema changes. Thanks!
Happiness about life choices
Interesting article in the Australian today about lifestyle choices and theaffect that can have upon your psychological wellbeing. Key factors that contribute to happiness include:
- healthy lifestyle
- long-term goals,
- faith
- working hours
- social participation
Your partners personality plays a part in this as well (a large part I would imagine!). Getting married to a nag would probably neutralize any benefit of the above… Article below.
WordPress – Simple Press VS BB Press
I have just started to evaluate two Forum add-ons for WordPress. My 15 minute look at either product left me undecided as to which software I should implement for a community website that I am currently working on.
Simple Press looks to be designed and developed from the ground up for integration into WordPress. It looks to have a comprehensive administrative interface and bells and whistles normally associated with dedicated forum software. My first impressions were that it would require significant styling effort to match the site I am working on.
BB Press on the other hand is an independent install which can leverage of a WordPress Installation and can share WP membership accounts and cookie authentication. It has actually been written by the authors of WP and is what they are using for their official Forums. Theming looked straight forward, however the administrative interface is not integrated into WordPress, either are the themes, which would require re-creating so as to match your site. Features are lightweight compared to Simple Press but that is not of a great concern to me.
I was just wondering if anyone out there has implemented either one of these products and what your impressions of them are?
00904. 00000 – invalid identifier
I have been writing some scripts in oracle and have just encountered and solved a niggly little problem. Syntax difference between SQL Server and Oracle threw me.
On performing this query, was receiving this error: 00904. 00000 - “%s: invalid identifier”.
WITH tempTab AS
(
SELECT a,b,c,d,e, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (partition by a ORDER BY e) AS “RowNums”
FROM tableName
ORDER BY aASC
)
SELECT * From tempTab WHERE RowNums = 1
Because the RowNums is a created column name, the referred RowNums outside of the WITH clause must also be referenced in the same manner i,e “RowNums”
Logical right? ;P
Flock Web-browser
I have just downloaded and configured a new web browser called Flock. (http://www.flock.com/) It is actually pretty neat. Based on the mozilla engine, it aims to bring in all of your social networking sites into the one area.
You can access your email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo, access and post to Twitter and Facebook, post to your blog via a built in blog client (pretty basic) view rss feeds etc. I have been a default Internet Explorer user for many years, however the features in this browser and such that I think this will become my default web browser. I’m loving it!
I would love to know what you think.
Hello World! The search for a Word Press editor.
The time has come to revive my blog, and what better way to do this than start from scratch. I have told myself that it is time to start taking internet marketing seriously and as such, I am looking at getting up to speed with all of the new social networking technologies and what impact they can have on ecommerce businesses.
So before I get too serious, I need to find a decent editor for word press, and what I mean by that is a word press editor that can be run from windows, is easy to use and has some administrative features so I do not have to log into word press.
