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I was forced to install SQL Server 2005 X64 in my system, because my development DB was X64. Since my machine runs Win 7 X64, I was tempted to install on top of it. Anyway, I don’t have a spare machine, and VPC also does not support X64 OS .

I was thinking that everything should be fine because I did it on my Vista X64 before. But apparently not, after tweak the setting here and there, I was ended up with the following error screen:

I was sure that all pre-requisites has been installed properly, but it was still failed. My first attempt was checking IIS 7 configuration, but everything was fine. The machine passed IIS requirement checking at the beginning of the steps.

I tried the last resort, just checking my luck. Since I saw that SQL Native Client was failed to install, I tried to download the latest SQLNCLI and voila! It was installed successfully after I updated the native client. Moral of the story: Windows 7 X64 RC does not come with the latest SQLNCLI, and the one bundled in SQL 2005 CD is not compatible with Mr. 7.

To sum up, this is the steps to install SQL 05 X64 on Win 7 x64 RC:

Download and install the latest SQL Native client, it’s bundled under SQL 2005 Feature Pack family. I use the one from February 2007 and worked like a magic.

Second, make sure all pre-requisites are installed such as IIS 7 components (ASP.NET, CGI, IIS6 compatibility, etc). This is the case if we want to configure Reporting Services as well.

Once installation finished, update to SQL Server 2005 SP2. Without update, it won’t work because the security policy kicked out Mr. Administrator from SQL sysadmin role .

That’s all, happy testing …

I did presentation for MaxIT event on May 29, 2009 and one of the interesting discussion was SharePoint integration with Reporting Services. I know that SharePoint is hot here in Singapore. I also did demo on some new features of SSRS 2008 such as tablix and charting. My presentation slide can be downloaded here:

There are several advantages of integrating SSRS with SharePoint:

• Seamless UI for end user. They do not need to jump from one screen to another to open report and SharePoint dashboard at the same time.
• All reports are deployed as document library, so it follows all SharePoint library setting. It saves lots of time instead of managing report in separate report manager.
• All reports are under SharePoint security setting, giving better consolidated administrative from SharePoint perspective
• Render reports inside web part. It makes building SharePoint dashboard faster and easier.

What do we need to configure this:

• SharePoint Services 3.0 or MOSS 2007, It’s better if upgraded to SP1 or SP2.
• SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with SP2, or Reporting Services 2008.
• Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. There are 2 versions of add-in: SSRS 2005 and SSRS 2008.

Configuration can be simple (all in one box) or scale up to separate boxes. Below is the logical architecture if SSRS and SharePoint are installed on separate boxes:

Assuming that SharePoint already installed, below are the explanations to do integration.

Install SSRS 2005 + SP2 in the SharePoint box, or separate machine. Just make sure to select “Install Report Server but do not configure” when doing this. The default configuration is native mode instead of SharePoint integrated, so please take note. Once SSRS installed, upgrade to SP2 (minimum) or directly to SP3.

In the case of SSRS 2008, SharePoint integration feature is already built in. Upgrading to SQL 2008 SP1 is recommended but not compulsory. Another improvement of SSRS 2008 is guided installation wizard. Once the installation CD is plugged in, there will be a menu to install SSRS in SharePoint mode instead of native stand alone.

Configure SSRS to integrate with SharePoint. Open SSRS configuration manager and connect to SSRS instance then create a new virtual directory for ReportServer. This should be the address of existing IIS website where the report server to be configured.

Configuring Windows Service and Web Service identity is straight forward. Use Network Service as identity account if it is a single box installation. In the case of scale up scenario, it needs to provide a dedicated SSRS service account from AD and use it as SSRS identity.

The next step is to create a new database for ReportServerDB and make sure to specify database as SharePoint integrated mode. It has to connect to existing SQL Server database instance.

It is not necessary to configure IIS website for Report Manager because SharePoint is our report manager now. Email and execution account configuration can be ignored in the meantime, specially if we do not use automated report delivery by email.

Another part of configuration is inside SharePoint central admin. Install SharePointRS.msi (SharePointRS_X64.msi for 64 bit) in SharePoint box. This package needs to be installed at every front end web server if SharePoint is configured as web farm. By the way, this file is Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint I mentioned earlier. Once installation finished, do IISRESET and open SharePoint Central Admin. A new Reporting Services configuration menu is available.

SharePoint has to know the address of Report Server which is under IIS virtual directory. Security configuration should be in windows integrated mode. This can be done under “Manage integration setting” link.

SharePoint also has to connect to ReportServerDB that already created earlier. Specify the name of SQL Server instance and click OK and specify windows account to connect to SQL Server.

There is another note for multiple boxes scenario: Reporting Services need to have local access to SharePoint object model in order to communicate with SharePoint. It means SharePoint binary has to be installed in SSRS machine, but left it empty without web application. It just needs to join existing SharePoint farm during installation, it is not necessary to create a site collection.

That’s all configuration needed. Now time to test it. Create a new library in SharePoint with the type of Report Library, for example “Sales Report”. Open existing SSRS source code (with Visual Studio of course) and deploy them to SharePoint. The tricky part is now the deployment location has changed. Remember that SharePoint is our report manager now. Below is the deployment configuration in Visual Studio:

What is the difference? Now it connects to SharePoint site as report server instead of http://myserver/reportserver. Data source and report folder location should point to address of “Sales Report” which is created earlier. The Sales Report library should display all reports after the deployment completed successfully.

Clicking “Product Line Sales” bring up SSRS report under SharePoint, nice .

I don’t like full screen report, can we render them as web part?

Yes, report can be rendered as web part, and with all SharePoint flexibility, just drag and drop to any zones to display them. This web part is actually part of SharePointRS.msi installed previously. The name is Reporting Services viewer web part.

One page may render multiple web part and display them in a nice dashboard as follow:

Managing the report is easy. Everything can be done under SharePoint. Click one of the report and java script popup tells us what all related reporting services setting can be done.

Nice feature eh? Now we have another more reason to implement BI under SharePoint .

One more thing, Microsoft does provide a comprehensive guide to achieve this integration here.

This is a quick post of my presentation slide and demo codes for Singapore SQL Server User Group last week. I presented the following topics:

• What is data warehouse
• Data warehouse design
• How to load dimension and fact table
• Performance trade of
• Best practices in DW design and ETL
• Demos on SSIS

Grab my PPT and demo from my skydrive here:

Backing up database is a routine DBA job. This easy task become a headache when the machine runs out of disk space. We need to cleanup the disk or attach a new one to do the backup. Fortunately, SQL Server 2008 comes with built in compression feature of backup set. We can do backup and compress at the same time. What does it mean?

• Save disk space, the compressed size is only around 10% of normal backup.
• Faster backup time.
• Faster restore time (surprise)!.

This is very convenience approach instead of doing normal backup and compress it with Winzip. According to benchmark I did, Winzip compression works slower than backup with compress on the fly. Not mention that we also have to unzip the file to restore from backup.

I am also surprise because restoring compressed backup is faster than non compressed. Logically, it needs to decompress and restore so it should be slower than restoring normal one. But my benchmark showed the opposite. I modified the AdventureWorks2008 sample database and insert additional data to make it bigger.

Below is my benchmark results with 900 MB size.

• Backup with no compress: 115 seconds
• Backup with compress: 49 seconds
• Restore from non compressed backup : 123 seconds
• Restore from compressed backup : 113 seconds

So, are you convinced? Here are the scripts to do compressed backup.

Specify with compression when doing a backup:

BACKUP DATABASE AdventureWorks2008
TO DISK = 'C:\backupdb\advworksbackupcompress.bak'
WITH COMPRESSION

The result is a compressed backup file, it’s smaller size then non compressed:

It’s reduced from 900+ MB to only 118 MB, not bad right?

Restoring from compressed backup is straight forward. No additional option required. Just normal restore syntax from the name of backup set.

RESTORE DATABASE AdventureWorks2008
FROM DISK = 'C:\backupdb\advworksbackupcompress.bak'
WITH REPLACE

I use with REPLACE option to override existing AdventureWorks2008 database.

I had a bad experience with transaction log file, it was 8 years ago. But thanks to Mr.Bad, I learnt very important lesson as newbie DBA at that time. This is the story: my ERP application which sitting on top of SQL Server 2000 was fine at Friday afternoon. I went home for a weekend, only to find everybody was starred at me at Monday morning. What had happened? The ERP was crashed, actually it couldn’t start at all.

I went to my SQL Server box, and the guy was stopped. It’s not started. I checked everything from security permission to possibility of virus, nil. Then I found that the disk was out of space because of transaction log explosion. The accounting guy was doing quarterly stock journal in the system, and it caused transaction log growth exponentially. There was an audit table which recording all journal operation, and obviously the INSERT operation was the source of problem.

Moral of the story: make sure you have automated way to manage transaction log growth.

There are 2 way to shrink the log:

• Detach database, delete the big log, and re-attach without log file. SQL Server will create a new, fresh log file with minimum initial size. It is 2MB by default. Disadvantage: the database will not be available during the process. Offline duration depends on how fast is the detach – attach operation takes time.
• Better approach: use SHRINKFILE of DBCC command. This is better because I do not need to bring the system OFF.

Regardless of the approach, make sure to do full database backup. Shrinking the log deletes historical transaction that may be needed to restore database to specific point of time. Just in case, make sure to do full backup. You have been warned right .

These are the steps to shrink a huge log file:

First, obtain the log filename, simply use sp_helpdb as follow:

sp_helpdb 'AdventureWorks'

It returns all files in AdventureWorks:

Then shrink AdventureWorks log file to 2 MB size:

USE AdventureWorks
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE (AdventureWorks_Log, 2)
GO

The outcome is 20 GB log file has been shrunken to 2 MB:

I usually run DBCC SHRINKFILE on scheduled basis, by attaching SQL script to SQL Agent job. This is easier and painless .

I presented at Community Technology Update 2008, organized by Microsoft Singapore DPE on November 22, 2008. It was a fantastic community event, a place when community members gathered together to share their passion on latest Microsoft Technologies.

My first session at the morning was Web 2.0 Programming with Visual Studio 2008. I presented Web 2.0 term, and what kind of tools available in Visual Studio 2008 to achieve Web 2.0 effects. I was much inspired by DropThings project  by fellow ASP.NET MVP Omar Al Zabir.

The second session was about SQL Server Performance Tools. No, this is not yet another Microsoft product come out. It is a collection of free tools, scripts, and tips to identify server bottleneck and resolve performance problems. My idea was to share hidden tools and script to reveal performance bottleneck. I was presenting about PAL, SQLDiag, server side script and database tuning advisor. I have to give a big credit to Itzik Ben Gan book for collection of server side trace script instead of using graphical Profiler. Both PPTs are available for download from my Skydrive:

Web 2.0 with VS 2008

SQL Server Performance Tools

I am not able to publish my demo code at the moment, because it was running on my real machine at that time, so I need to fine tune and modify some configuration to avoid any problem. Once I finished with the changes, I will update share my demo code here.

The first step in SQL Server performance tuning usually starts with finding bottleneck at the server side. It includes monitoring to some suspicious symptoms on CPU, Memory, Disk, and various SQL Server counter. Yes, Performance Monitor tool is already available on Windows machine. It is a very valuable tool for detecting the server bottleneck, and it is free. Just type perfmon and we are ready to start to do monitoring.

Usually I create counter log and let the monitoring runs at the background based on specific schedule and sampling interval. With this way, I can minimize the performance impact by running Perfmon inside the box. Once I got the log data, then I am ready to start the analysis. There are thousands or even millions rows of logs inside. How do I analyze and finding the system behavior, detect the pattern and plan a possible actions? Obviously I can import the CSV log file to SQL table or Excel and then use my T-SQL knowledge to summarize the data. But actually there is easier way to do it, Clint Huffman of Microsoft already created PAL.

The PAL does query to the counter log data using Log Parser, and display it in a nice HTML format. It is a graphical chart data analysis, so that’s why PAL requires Office Web Component installed to view the report. We can download PAL from CodePlex, and don’t forget to install Log Parser and OWC11 as pre-requisites. So the steps to do analysis with PAL are:

• Collect counter log data with Perfmon
• Use counter log as input to PAL
• Analyze the report with PAL

The first screen of PAL will ask a location of counter log file that was created by Perfmon.

At the next screen, there are several options of system monitoring template. It depends of what kind of servers installed in the system.

The good things is PAL already comes with predefined template and threshold, so we do not need to think about the threshold for various counter. We con modify this template as well to suit our needs.

Here are several reports generated by PAL, very nice analysis with graphical trends.

I was in the situation when I had to modify some reports, but I did not have the source code (RDL) files on hand. I tried to go to SSRS server, and looking for download or save-as menu. I was expecting there are some ways to download the report definition so I can modify it under Visual Studio.

Unfortunately not, there is no built-in features in SSRS that for download or extract report from the server. Once deployed, it is there forever. I just thought to create small application using SSRS web services or API to extract the definition. But I was lucky enough that Jasper Smith created an amazing tool for this purpose.

I downloaded the RSScripter and install it on my machine. It can connect to both SQL 2000 and 2005, and generate the RDL, user, roles, and also the data source. This free tool is really fantastic.

I can also use this stuff to transfer the SSRS content from one server to another. A very good toolkit for server migration and deployment. The configuration is under option button, specify to transfer and as well as destination server.

I never think that this is a difficult or exceptional. I never configure it before, because my job does not really require to deploy such configuration. Someday in the morning, one student asked my this question: Why I cannot run Reporting Service 2005 on my Vista? This guy used Vista as his development machine and SQL Server was running fine except the SSRS.

Well, I saw some documentation so I’m sure there is away to do it. The problem is not Vista specific. This is IIS 7 matter instead of Vista. Vista runs IIS 7, and so does Win Server 2008. IIS 7 has several breaking changes compare with IIS 6, and some developers do not really know how to deal with some changes.

I decided to configure it on my Vista 64 bit desktop and worked like a charm. Nothing special, just couple of IIS 7 configurations and security setting. Here are the steps:

Step one: Make sure the Vista machine already upgraded to SP1. In Win Server 2008, It comes with SP1 by default.

Step two: Configure role services on IIS 7. This menu is accessible from IIS 7 setting or Control Panel > Program and Features. Make sure that the following features are activated:

IIS 6 Management Compatibility:
IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility

Application Development Feature:
ASP.NET
ISAPI Extensions
ISAPI Filters

HTTP Features:
Default Document
Directory Browsing
HTTP Errors
HTTP Redirection
Static Content

These are the screen capture in my Windows Server 2008 machine:

The next step is to install SQL Server 2005, including Reporting Services. proceed with SQL Server SP2 after that. After the installation finished, browse http://localhost/reports. The reporting services should run properly.

However, I noticed there are several small issues that may varies from machine to machine. If you got trouble to load SSRS after the above procedure, do some checking as follows:

Make sure the Reporting Services web sites (both reports and report server) run on top of the classic mode application pool. IIS 7 comes with 2 mode to run the pipeline: classic and integrated. The application pool for SSRS has to be in classic mode.

The complete step by step guide from Microsoft is here.

I took Beta exam no 70-448 last July, because I was curious how’s difficult it is. It is a Business Intelligence exam, a foundation for MCITP for SQL 2008 BI. I’ve touched SQL 2008 since it’s CTP 5 release so I’m quite familiar with the stuff.

I sat almost 3 hours in the testing room, clicked the finish button to end the exam. There was no on the spot scoring for beta. So I did not really know if I passed or fail. But I felt that I pass even with no flying marks. After more than 4 months, I just received email from MS learning. They said that I passed the Beta. Wow, It seems magic to me.

From: Microsoft Certified Professional Programs
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:22 AM
To: Muhammad Choirul Amri
Subject: Congratulations on Your Microsoft Certification! Access Your Benefits
Congratulations on earning your Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance certification! We hope you enjoy the benefits of your certification and of membership in the Microsoft Certified Professional community.

In fact, my knowledge on SQL 2005 helped a lot to clear the exam. I did not do special preparation for it. It was a free offer, so nothing to loose at my side. I really relied on my prior knowledge on SQL 05, play around with SQL 08 and of course my real world experience in the past. This is also a prove that at least I know the stuff better. I was not cramming the book and practice test to shot the test.

I logged in to my MCP transcript, and MCTS SQL 2008 BI Charter member is already under my belt. Yes, I’m the charter member.

I joined the rank of first 200 people who cleared this paper. I can’t wait to receive the welcome kit. Hopefully there will be something special for Charter Member

Now I challenge my friend Kasim and Zeddy. If you dare to fail, try the beta exam.