An unexpected error occurred in Report Processing. (rsUnexpectedError)

I'm creating one of the most important reports for the business and I'm having a weird problem. The report renders just fine in the browser but as soon as I try to export it to a PDF (which is basically what we do with all our reports - of course automatically through the webservice) it crashes with the above mentioned error.

After some surfing I came across an article in the Reporting Services newsgroup where one MattiasT had the same problem and he found the conditions for it to happen.

1. You are using a table.
2. The HideDuplicates property is used on a detail cell in this table.
3. The table contains a subreport.

And sure enough... when I remove the HideDuplicates the report generates just fine.

Unfortunately there seems to be no solution for the time being, except for changing the way you create the report because having all 3 conditions is a prerequisite.

TempDB and missing Device

Just had a nice little incident :-s

One of our development servers was used for tests with a SAN disk. They moved our TempDB to the SAN and after the tests removed the SAN disks. No problem, but they forgot to move the TempDB location to the local disks. Result? No more SQL Server :-x

In order to get it back up we did the following:
Start SQL Server from the command prompt with the following syntax
sqlserver -f -c -T3609 -T4022

-f: minimal configuration mode
-c: not as a service (console mode so you can follow the nice little thingies SQL Server does)
-T3609: skip tempdb creation at startup
-T4022: bypasses automatically started procedures

Then we updated sysdatabases and sysaltfiles (I know it's hardcore) with the correct file locations.

Restart SQL Server and GO GO GO

The Daily WTF (What The F*ck)

For those of you that don't know the site, this is really one you should visit every day ;-)
It's a website that gathers programming stupidity on a daily basis.

Connected Systems Developer Competition - Win $50,000 USD

If you are feeling very lucky ;)
Check out this link.

Mindi Abair

Heard some nice music yesterday. I was chilling with some music on SmoothJazz when I heard a song by Mindi Abair called Make A Wish, very nice indeed! When I was all chilled out I switched to Radio Paradise which is really a very good radio station.

Check them out.

Week @ Home

Aaah, just got back from a little holiday :-s
It's good to be back but I liked it more being home ;-)

CHAR and NULL

CHAR fields always take up the space assigned to them. Now you may think that it wouldn't be the case if it was NULL because that is determined by a bitmask in the row data (this bit is always present in SQL Server 2000 even if your column is not nullable).

This was true in SQL Server 6.5 but not in SQL Server 2000. So if you really need a nullable CHAR field it may be better to define the field as VARCHAR.

Report Packs

If you are working with Reporting Services please don't forget to check here once in a while.
Microsoft provides some nice Report Packs from time to time.

Have fun

New computer - installed

Installed and man does it fly!
I am very pleased with the results although I had some trouble with XP64 and I had to install XP32 again :-(

Kimberly L. Tripp on developing for SQL Server

Check it out here

A bold statement: "Open source could damage the market"

Bob Hayward, senior vice president and chief research officer, Gartner Research Asia-Pacific, said that software developers could be discouraged from creating new software because of the multitude of open source software available for free. This is further driven by major vendors that are making their software available as open source.

Check out the complete article here

Software Patents... No no no

The EU has voted against "Software Patents".
Of the 732 people 648 voted no, a clear vote imho.

I suppose this will not be the end of the whole story...

New computer - update

Yes yes yes :)
It has arrived... only the CPU was out of stock so I have to wait a little bit :'( If all goes well it should arrive tomorrow.

I also decided to buy another case :-)

SAN Phase II

We got to talk with the people responsible for the SAN.
Seems our plans are quite useless, the layout of the disks has changed :-( Anyway, we decided on a new plan. Currently +200 disks are assigned to our development servers. We're waiting for the draft as proposed by them (considering our remarks of course).

Enterprise Library - June 2005 Release

Get it here

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.0

Download it here

I assume you all know this tool?

Those dreadful 'Software Patents'

Check out this post by Clemens Vasters

Tetris SAN

Hmmm... we're trying to determine the layout of our development servers databases and files on the new SAN. We have to place 7.5TB for 48 servers in 14GB blocks... it looks a lot like tetris :-D

AWE 3GB PAE... WTF?

Lately we have been experimenting with the memory options in our tests of a new server. Sometimes it's not quite clear what all those options do, I'll try to give a short and clear description here.

/3GB

Windows normally allows user mode applications to use 2GB of memory. The switch moves the starting point of the kernel to 3GB making it available to user mode applications. Windows 2003 added an extra switch userva to customize the exact amount between 2GB and 3GB. In short this makes it possible for your applications to use 3GB instead of 2GB of memory. Do note that there may be some drawbacks when your server is very powerful. In some cases the server might be able to handle so many threads that it's 1GB of kernel memory is insufficient.

Note Microsoft Product Support Services strongly recommends using a range
of memory for the /USERVA switch that lies within the range of 2800-3030. This
range is wide enough to provide a large enough pool of system page table entries
for all currently observed issues. Usually a setting of /userva=2800 will
provide close to the maximum available number of system page table entries
possible.

PAE (Physical Address Extension)

PAE allows Windows to use more memory than 4GB in combination with AWE

AWE

AWE is an API that enables programs to address more than 4GB (with PAE). It enables them to reserve memory as 'non-paged' memory. This means that memory taken by AWE is never paged to disk until the applications is closed or explicitly frees it.

8 Steps to better Transaction Log throughput

For those of you who don't read Kimberly Tripp's blog: check out this great post
And after that add her website to your favorites!