Cumulative security update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows XP (KB956391) that your PC is probably trying to get you to install right now will leave you unable to print reports from SQL Server Reporting Services. Instead, you will get the following error message
Unable to load client print control
Nice! For me, uninstalling the patch fixed the issue, but here’s hoping that there is a fix soon, because it’s causing havoc.
Apparently, applying KB954606 fixes the issue, but Microsoft have not made it very obvious that
- KB956391 breaks SSRS printing
- KB954606 can fix it
Tomorrow I’ll try applying both patches and update this post with the results.
Came across an issue that held us up for a bit when we installed SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 Server.
When connecting to Reporting Services via SSMS, we found that the Report Server properties were "greyed out", meaning that even though we were logged in to the server as members of the admins group, we could not administer the report server properties.
Turns out on Windows server, the trick is to "Run SSMS as Administrator" and then you get full admin rights… see the pic below
Made me smile…. well something’s got to at the moment…
Having installed SQL Server 2008, one thing threw me a little - how to enable the "My Reports" feature, which is disabled by default.
In SQL 2005 you could do this via the Site Settings area, but in SQL 2008 this option had disappeared.
Books online still incorrectly suggests that this is the way to do it, however it sure isn’t… luckily a bit of googling provided the solution.
- Connect to your report server via SSMS
- Got to Properties
- Check the "Enable My Reports" checkbox and apply
Joseph Albahari has made available a neat little tool for running queries using LINQ.
LINQ (which stands for Language Integrated Query) is something I have been meaning to get around to since I first saw it demoed early in the SQL 2008 release cycle.
You can get the (free) tool, called LINQPad here
More information on LINQ here and here
SQL Server Kilimanjaro and Project Madison
This week the BI Conference has kicked off with an announcement! There will be a BI focused release of SQL Server code named Kilimanjaro which is expected H1 2010 with CTPs available within the next 12 months. Kilimanjaro is focused on "People Ready BI".
A key component of Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini", this is all about self-service BI using Excel. The vision behind Gemini is to free IT resources by giving business intelligence analysis and reporting capabilities to the end-users without IT losing control.
Is this where Microsoft finally fill the gap left when they shoe-horned some parts of Proclarity in to PPS, leaving themselves without a great stand-alone OLAP client tool? Let’s hope so… I am a little uncertain as to the direction that they are taking BI in. As a once frustrated end-user, I can see how the masses of information workers will love the capabilities. I can also see that this may well lead to a huge increase in unstructured an potentially conflicting information if not managed very carefully.
At the same Microsoft will be releasing "Project Madison", this is the integration of Datallegro which will offer you an easy scale out solution to support data warehouses of up to 100s of terabytes.
All in all very exciting news and I will keep you up-to-date whenever I learn more. I am certainly hoping for more information on the management of the data, how this fits with the overall DW framework, and mysterious lack of information to date on PerformancePoint2…
Although SQL Server 2008 was “launched” last February at a marketing event that also featured Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, this week Microsoft finally released its database software to manufacturing.
SQL Server 2008 is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will also be available for evaluation downloads. Pricing for the database will be the same as the previous version, SQL Server 2005.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx Has Ent, Dev, Std, Web and Workgroup for subscriber downloads, can’t see Express or Ent Trial yet on the non subscriber pages.
Also Eval Edition and Feature Pack are now available
If you need some help installing, see this SQL School Video
