Roman Rehak

Presenting at Montreal SQL Server User Group

roman — Mon, 23 May 2011 18:11:00 GMT

Tomorrow (5/24) I will be presenting at the Montreal SQL Server User Group meeting. It's a double topic presentation - Introduction to SQL Azure, and SQL Server Reporting Services Programming . It's the usual meeting place, the Microsoft building at 6:30....(read more)

SQL Saturday #59 followup

roman — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:15:00 GMT

My session at SQL Saturday #59 went great, the room was packed with people sitting on the floor. The only thing I didn't like was that I had to compress 75 minutes to 50. My apologies to Allan Hirt for not getting out quickly, I got a little carried away...(read more)

Speaking at SQL Saturday #59 in New York City

roman — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 02:10:00 GMT

I will be presenting this weekend at SQL Saturday #59 in NYC, doing my favorite session SQL Server Development Tips and Tricks. The schedule for this event looks very good. Looks like the event is "sold out" so I expect pretty good attendance, especially...(read more)

PASS 2010 afterthoughts

roman — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:31:00 GMT

Last week I was in Seattle at PASS, just like everyone else that's at least remotely interested in SQL Server. Here is a collection of miscellanous thoughts and observations: - This was my summit #10. I still recall my first PASS ten years ago in San...(read more)

Moving SQL Server aliases to another computer

roman — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:06:00 GMT

I utilize SQL Server aliases a lot, especially since for some reason I don't get name resolution on our network over VPN. So I typicaly create an alias and map the name to the IP address of each SQL Server I use a lot on the network. I am in the process...(read more)

SQL Azure free trial extended till March 31st 2011

roman — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:05:00 GMT

If you are interested in checking out SQL Azure for free, they just extended the trial period till 3/31/2011. What it boils down to is that you get to have a 1GB web database free of charge for 3 months, Good deal if you want to evaluate what this Azure...(read more)

Issues with 2008 to R2 upgrade

roman — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:34:00 GMT

I was recently upgrading a production server to R2 and it turned out to be a fairly frustrating, and in the end unsuccessful experience. This was the Standard Edition. The installer popped a message and said that the system needed to be rebooted due to...(read more)

SQL Saturday #39 in NYC

roman — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:06:00 GMT

This weekend I will be speaking at the NYC SQL Saturday . The whole event was supposed to be BI focused but now the schedule shows a lot of non BI stuff as well. I will be presenting SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Programming , one of my favorite...(read more)

SQL Saturday Boston 2010

roman — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:49:00 GMT

Yesterday I presented my "SQL Server Development Tips and Tricks" session at SQL Saturday #34 in Boston. Here are some of my thoughts and observations: I've been crazy busy the last two weeks and only got some time to work on my session Friday evening....(read more)

Your work may not be lost

roman — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:22:00 GMT

One of the things that I found dissapointing in Management Studio 2008 is that in the event of a crash (and in addition to crashing in the first place), is that on a restart it doesn't show me a dialog with a list of auto-saved files, like my SSMS 2005...(read more)

OT: Corrupted Outlook file

roman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:10:00 GMT

This is not a SQL Server post but it might be beneficial to some of you. Over the last few months I've been having huge issues with Outlook 2007. Aside from running like molasses on a cold day, it consistently crashes a few times a week. Instaling the...(read more)

Backup compression no longer Enterprise edition only

roman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:10:00 GMT

Last week at PASS I had a discussion with a program manager on the SQL Server team and he told me that in SQL Server 2008 R2, backup compression will be available in the Standard edition. I suspect this announcement will leave many of you very happy....(read more)

PASS 2009 recap

roman — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:33:00 GMT

This week I was at PASS just like many other folks from here. Good times as always, although less partying than in the past. Since I am still in recovery and relying on Percoset to get me through the day, I was wiped every evening. Here are a few thoughts...(read more)

Issue with restoring 2000 backups on 2008

roman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:22:00 GMT

Recently we've been experiencing a lot of headaches with SQL Server 2008 crashing while restoring a backup taken on a SQL Server 2000 production server. The crash resulted in a stack dump but SQL Server would continue running, although less stable, and...(read more)

SSRS report rendering from command prompt

roman — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:53:00 GMT

A while ago I posted on what now seems to be a defunct blog site, SQL Junkies, a blog about how you can use the RS scripting utility to generate SQL Server Reporting Services reports from command line prompt. In preparation for the DevTeach conference I decided to resurrect it for a demo and since a few things changed between SSRS 2000 and SSRS 2008, it required some work and digging through books online. One of the changes was that starting with SQL Server 2005, Reporting Services provides two separate web service endpoints. The ReportService2005 service is used for management and administrative functions, and the ReportExecution2005 service contains functions related to report rendering. By default, RSS script connects to the management endpoint but in this case since I wanted to use the render function, I needed to connect to the other endpoint. So, the trick here is to use the new endpoint (–e) switch parameter and specify RsExec2005 to use the execution endpoint instead.

Here is a code sample showing rendering from the command prompt, the following DOS command runs the utility against specified report server (-s parameter) and instructs it to execute a file that follows the –I parameter. The third parameter specifies the execution endpoint:

rs -i "c:\temp\reports\Render Report.rss" -s http://rrehak/ReportServer_Katmai -e Exec2005

The RSS utility will render a report (I am using one of the sample Adventure Works reports) and save the rendered file in MS Excel format. The contents of the Render Report.rss file look like this, you may need to modify to match your path to the report:

Public Sub Main()

Dim format as string = "EXCEL"

Dim fileName as String = "C:\temp\reports\Product Line Sales.xls"

Dim reportPath as String = "/AdventureWorks 2008 Sample Reports/Product Line Sales 2008"

' Prepare Render arguments

Dim historyID as string = Nothing

Dim deviceInfo as string = Nothing

Dim extension as string = Nothing

Dim encoding as string

Dim mimeType as string

Dim warnings() AS Warning = Nothing

Dim streamIDs() as string = Nothing

Dim results() as Byte

rs.LoadReport(reportPath, historyID)

results = rs.Render(format, deviceInfo, extension, _

mimeType, encoding, warnings, streamIDs)

' Open a file stream and write out the report

Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenWrite(fileName)

stream.Write(results, 0, results.Length)

stream.Close()

End Sub