SQL Server Active Transaction Text

06 Dec
December 6, 2011

I was having issues today with my SQL Server Activity Monitor, it kept timing out every time I tried to see active transactions, and so I devised this wee script which returns the currently active transactions in the instance, as well as the text of the procedure running.

Read more →

SSRS Deserialization Failed Issue

21 Nov
November 21, 2011

I’ve ran into this wee SSRS issue today, a quick fix mind you, but I thought its worth mentioning.

The issue is in-relation to the error message: Deserialization failed: The ‘DataType’ attribute is not declared. Line X, position Y.

Read more →

Optimize an Analytics Account

21 Nov
November 21, 2011

Correctly and productively setting up your tracking solution is crucial for a successful online marketing campaign, and in order to fully understand how users are interacting with your site. In this post I go through some of the top optimization recommendations for your Google Analytics account.

Read more →

SQL Server SSIS Custom DLL Folders

17 Nov
November 17, 2011

This is really more of a note than an actual post, but here I give the relevant folders that you need to ensure you have your custom DLLs in when running an SSIS package.

Read more →

Convert JSON to XML using Yahoo! Pipes

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

A quick and dirty way to convert JSON to XML, using the popular Yahoo! Pipes platform.

Read more →

Reporting Service TempDB Partitioning during a Scale-Out

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

When scaling-out your SQL Server Reporting Service, it is essential to consider how your I/O will behave and how you can better utilize your disk configuration for optimum read and write.

One strategy is to partition the Reporting Service TempDB, which can be split onto multiple disks to better take advantage of the underlying SAN or a RAID configuration, and improve request parallelism, especially important when considering a large multi-user deployment of Reporting Service.

Read more →

SSRS Report Execution Statistics and Analysis

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

Understanding and analyzing your SSRS report execution statistics is critical if you are serious about optimizing your SSRS reports, over the years working with SSRS I have found and developed a few procedures that are helpful in analyzing problematic report (in terms of execution time).

This post will go through some of the procedures you could use to look at your SSRS reports execution times.

Read more →

SSRS Execution Time Types and Optimization

13 Nov
November 13, 2011

Analyzing the performance of your SSRS reports in terms of execution and rendering time is crucial when trying to optimize your SSRS reports. Although SQL Server’s Reporting Service could be a bit of a black box sometimes, usually there are some back-end ways to accomplish most tasks.

This post will go through the SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) Execution Types (stages), as well as some top line recommendations on how to optimize the time taken to execute each stage.

To get your SSRS reports execution statistics, you can check out my SSRS Report Execution Statistics and Analysis post.

Read more →

Change SQL Server Transaction Log or Data File Drive or Path

05 Nov
November 5, 2011

Sometimes you might need to re-organize your SQL server files around the server in order to improve I/O efficiency or simply because the current structure cannot coupe with the transaction log file or data file growth rate, and you need to expand onto other drives.

This post goes through how one might go about changing the SQL Server 2008 transaction log or data file location, commit this file move, and also diagnose and resolve any errors that could arise from performing such a move.

Read more →

Google Search Easter-Eggs and Tricks

05 Nov
November 5, 2011

Google over the years have added many “Easter-Eggs” or fun tricks to its search engine, these are usually triggered by some search keyword, or as a public page (with some PR around it) explaining one of Google’s services in a ridiculous way (these generally occur around April Fool’s day).

Read more →