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In October 2009 I created 2 codeplex projects which I would to tell you about: SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks (ssrsmsbuildtasks) A few years ago I created some tasks for MSBuild to help deploy reports for my project, details can be found here,  since then my tasks have been re-used in a few other projects within my ...

AAAaaaaah...Yesterday was just one of those days.  I was trying to do something very simple in a script task - assign the current datetime value to one of my variables - and was pulling my stubbly hair out trying to do it. I am happy to confess to not being the strongest .netter in the world but we do also in SSIS get a pretty pony script ...

Putting all the above into one stored procedure has often been a TSQL dynamic nightmare putting together various bits of SQL strings and executing them. Looking around the web I have found various examples but not for all of what I wanted to do in one procedure. There were examples for paging, filtering and sorting but all as separate examples. ...

For my current project I have inherited a couple of customized RMO applications. They help to create the merge publication, publication snapshots, subscribers, subscribers snapshot and synchronization sessions.  When it became time to use the application on a Windows 2003 64 bit server I came across a couple of issues when trying to ...

I’ve just gone through an informal and limited evaluation process for a charting tool for a BI dashboard.  It included some of the RS extension products, ProClarity and ChartFX.  Of course I would have been keen to use ProClarity, but in this case the cost was a little high and, to be honest, it would have been a sledgehammer to ...

I wrote an article for the September 2006 issue of SQL Server Standard magazine:   The version that was finally published was a very cut down version with minimal code snippets.  This was for obvious reasons; they had to fit the content onto small columns in the magazine.  For the readers who would prefer the more verbose ...

 I’ve seen a few Conchango developers in the past use sp_xml_preparedocument and OPENXML to commit a serialized collection object to the database.  We can do this in SQL Server 2000 and it avoids a round trip to the database for each collection member.  This can mean a huge performance improvement.  Imagine having to call ...

A colleague of mine once asked me to do a “Number of Days since Last Incident” calculated measure (sounds like fun!).  Basically, he had a measure called Incidents and wanted a running count of days since the last incident. E.g.Date        Incidents        ...

I am naturally interested in MDX stored procs so I tried them out.  I have often wondered how they compare to SQL CLR.  I hereby commit myself to (trying to) do a few blog posts in this space!  Here are some findings regarding when to use them.It is well known that the strengths of SQL CLR for real-life scenarios are as ...

There is some literature out there that says it is possible to impersonate the current user’s logon for external access (file system, registry, etc.) in SQL/CLR sprocs, but not much in the way of sample code.  As I have crossed this bridge, I thought I should share the knowledge.  This now works with assemblies catalogued as ...