Continue reading »]]> After a Powershell session at SQL Saturday (Phoenix #131) this weekend, I’m now suddenly on the lookout for handy powershell commands. The first one lets you see the number of Active* sessions on your IIS site (* because HTTP is stateless, it’s really the number of connections that have been opened recently – not what’s currently active, which is likely next to zero. I tried browsing around on a test site and it showed only my one user connected).

To get the currently active user count, here’s the powershell:

# Ensure you use the server's actual name, not LOCALHOST, which won't work
$Servername = "Your Server Name"
$Sitename = "Name of your IIS Site"

Get-Counter "\\$ServerName\web service($SiteName)\current connections"

Continue reading »]]> I’ll be presenting a pair of lightning sessions at SQL Saturday in Phoenix, AZ, on April 28th – if you’re in the area and up for a day of free training on everything database-related, as well as some networking time with your fellow DBAs and Developers, please join us!

Here’s the summary for my two lightning sessions (they’ll be 15 minutes each):

Automating SQL Server source control – This session will look at a quick and easy process that takes regular snapshots of object definitions in the database and stores any changes.

Representing SQL Server data spaces visually – This session will take a quick look at a Codeplex project that does this, SQL Space Map, and how it accomplishes it by leveraging a library from Microsoft Research

If you’d like to see what else is planned for the day, http://sqlsaturday.com/131/schedule.aspx. You can also follow the event on twitter at #sqlsat131

Continue reading »]]> Sometimes you want to take some query results and export them directly to an XLS file – here’s how you can set that up in SQL Server. The biggest caveat is that you need to run it from an x86 instance of SQL Server – the x64 instance won’t have access to the Jet driver needed to write the Excel file (Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0), where the x86 version will. In fact, we maintain an older x86 instance of SQL Server for random processes like this that need it – x64 is better in almost every case, but we can’t see to completely ditch x86…

I use a stored proc that I call from a SQL Agent Job, which works great. The actual process is a bit awkward – for starters, you’ll need access to xp_cmdshell. SQL Server can’t create a new Excel file from scratch, so you have to keep a blank Excel file around, make a copy of it, and then insert into the copy to get your final result.

That said, here’s the code to generate the XLS file from your query results:

SELECT Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4
  INTO ##YourTempTable
  FROM SomeOtherTable

SET @Folder = 'C:\Temp\'
SET @DocumentBlank = 'Your Document - Blank'
SET @DocumentLong = 'Your Document - ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), GETDATE(), 120)

DECLARE @CMD NVARCHAR(4000)
SET @CMD = 'COPY "' + @folder + @DocumentBlank + '.xls" "' + @Folder + @DocumentLong + '.xls"'
exec master..xp_cmdshell @CMD

-- Export the Excel sheet
SET @CMD = 'insert into OPENROWSET(''Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0'',
	''Excel 8.0;Database=' + @Folder + @DocumentLong + '.xls;'',
	''SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]'')
	select Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4 from ##YourTempTable'

exec sp_executesql @CMD

Once that’s exported, you can just set up the email process using sp_send_dbmail and attach the file you just generated:

DECLARE @Body VARCHAR(2000)

SET @Attachments = @Folder + @DocumentLong  + '.xls'
SET @Body = 'Your file has been generated for ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), GETDATE(), 120)

exec msdb..sp_send_dbmail @profile_name = 'YourMailProfile',
	@Recipients = 'Recipients@YourDomain.biz',
	@subject = 'Your file is ready',
	@Body = @Body,
	@file_attachments = @DocumentLong

Continue reading »]]> In some situations, you’ll need to work with a list of numbers or dates that are between some start or end, and you don’t have a complete list handy for joining to. Using the script below, you can create one to use in your query – if you wanted to use this in-line in another SQL Statement (and assuming you’re using SQL 2005+), you could either do a subquery or a WITH CTE clause and then join directly to it.

To do it, I’m using a table that has a large number of rows in it, even in an empty database (sys.columns), and then doing a cross-join to ensure that I’ll have enough rows to satisfy my entire range. This table has about 890 rows in an empty databases (or you can use the “model” database if you don’t have any user databases handy), meaning that the cross join yields about 800,000 rows – enough for almost 2200 years of days, or 100 years of hourly increments (change the “dd” in the “DATEADD” statements below to “hh” or even “mi” to do any increment of time you want).

The code:

DECLARE @StartDate DATETIME,
	    @EndDate   DATETIME

	SET @StartDate = '2012-12-01'
	SET @EndDate   = '2015-12-31'

;WITH numberlist(number)
   AS (SELECT RANK() over(order by c1.object_id,
								   c1.column_id,
								   c2.object_id,
								   c2.column_id)
	     from sys.columns c1
   	    cross
	     join sys.columns c2)
SELECT DATEADD(dd, number-1, @StartDate)
  FROM numberlist
 WHERE DATEADD(dd, number-1, @StartDate) <= @EndDate

I’m using dates above, but if you wanted to use INT instead, it’s pretty straightforward:

DECLARE @Start INT,
		@End   INT

	SET @Start = 1500
	SET @End   = 64000

;WITH numberlist(number)
   AS (SELECT RANK() over(order by c1.object_id,
								   c1.column_id,
								   c2.object_id,
								   c2.column_id)
	     from sys.columns c1
   	    cross
	     join sys.columns c2)
SELECT @Start + number - 1
  FROM numberlist
 WHERE @Start + number - 1 <= @End

Continue reading »]]> My backup/maintenance plan recently started failing with the following (not so helpful) error message:

Code: 0xC0024104
Source: Update Statistics
Description: The Execute method on the task returned error code 0x80004002
(Unable to cast object of type 'System.DBNull' to type 'System.String'.).
The Execute method must succeed, and indicate the result using an
"out" parameter.

It turns out the error was as a result of one of my databases being offline – the plan was set to work on all databases (the default), but there’s a checkbox that tells SQL Server to skip databases that aren’t online, and it’s not checked by default when you create your maintenance plan. Checking it solved the problem and the maintenance plan ran normally again.

To find the box, open your maintenance plan, and then in each task that runs in your databases, open the properties and click the dropdown, then check the box as in this picture:

Continue reading »]]> After a recent installation of Crystal Reports Designer XI-R2, I attempted to connect to our Business Objects Enterprise installation to modify a report and was greeted with the error message:

Security plugin error: An error has occurred in the plugin, but the plugin is unable to return a detailed error message.

I’d been told that fixing this issue required a service pack to the Crystal Designer installation, but it was over 200MB and before I rolled it out, I decided to do a bit of searching. It turns out that this error is caused by a pair of missing DLL files on the local machine:

smcommonutil.dll
smerrlog.dll

You can get these files from your Business Objects Enterprise CMS servers, since they have the full install already, from either of these locations:

(Install Drive):\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\
(System Drive):\Windows\System32 (SysWow64 if you’ve installed it on an x64 system)

Grab those two files and copy them to the C:\Windows\System32 folder on your local workstation and you’ll be good to go – now Crystal Designer connects to the BOE CMS without any complaints at all.

Thanks to this forum post for pointing me in the right direction!

Continue reading »]]> Recently I added a second LUN to a clustered instance of SQL Server to isolate the logs files (and another for the TempDB) and I mounted them to an empty NTFS folder as I’ve done before, but when I started SQL Server, I recieved the following error:

CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5 (Access is denied.)
while attempting to open or create the physical file
'X:\MSSQL10_50.INSTANCENAME\TempDB\tempdb.mdf

The error means that SQL Server doesn’t have NTFS rights to the location of the TempDB, but when I tried to add those rights, the permissions weren’t granted to the domain proxy account as I’d expected, but were instead granted to the service SID account, MSSQL$InstanceName. I attempted to grant the permissions to this account at the new location, but couldn’t get it to resolve to an actual account. What finally worked was:

1. In the permissions change dialog box, change the “Location” from the domain to the local machine (even though it’s a cluster and your using a domain account to run the service)
2. In the text box, type “NT Service\MSSQL$INSTANCENAME” and click “Check Names”

Even though that appears to be a local account, it will resolve properly on all the cluster nodes involved. This step, as opposed to using the domain proxy account the service is running as, was necessary because (during the initial SQL Server setup process) I’d selected to use the proxy account SID to host permissions rather than a domain group. The better choice permissions-wise, but the source of some confusion!

Continue reading »]]> In case you were in the middle of a download from MSDN or another Microsoft site that uses the transfer manager and you’ve accidentally closed it, you can find it at one of two locations:

If you installed it from an MSI:
x64 – C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft File Transfer Manager\TransferMgr.exe
x86 – C:\Program Files\Microsoft File Transfer Manager\TransferMgr.exe

Downloaded automatically in IE (more likely):
%SystemRoot%\Downloaded Program Files\TransferMgr.exe

Mine was hiding in that second location – if you download it directly in IE, it doesn’t create a start menu icon, so you’re not able to re-launch the tool unless you know the file location.

Continue reading »]]> I was attempting to bind a remoting listening to a particular port and kept receiving an exception when attempting to bind on the production Windows 2008 R2 server itself – it always worked fine on both my development box and our test server. Here’s the exception:

Exception message: An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions
Stack Trace:
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.DoBind(EndPoint endPointSnapshot, SocketAddress socketAddress)
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Bind(EndPoint localEP)
   at System.Net.Sockets.TcpListener.Start(Int32 backlog)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.ExclusiveTcpListener.Start(Boolean exclusiveAddressUse)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpServerChannel.StartListening(Object data)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.Tcp.TcpServerChannel..ctor(IDictionary properties, IServerChannelSinkProvider sinkProvider, IAuthorizeRemotingConnection authorizeCallback)

Though Googling gave some suggestions to run the process as an administrator (no effect), the actual problem was that my process was trying to listen on a port that was already taken by another listener. Since the port was already in use, it couldn’t bind and I received the exception. Stopping the other process resolved the issue immediately.

Not really a clear error message, since it really had nothing to do with permissions at all, but there you go.

Continue reading »]]> I recently stumbled across a great walk-through for clustering SQL Server on newer versions of Windows. It’s really thorough – everything from setting up iSCSI (in this case, to simulate a shared disk when it’s physically attached to one node – not ideal, but lets you test the walk-through), adding the required server roles, preparing the servers, and then a walkthrough of every screen in the SQL installation process. Thanks to the writer of this awesome blog!

http://dbperf.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/walkthrough-cluster-setup-sql-win-2008/