Month: January 2018

TSQL Performance Rule #1

There’s no significance to this one being number one 🙂 its just the one I’ve just been thinking about 🙂 I may now have built this up a bit more than is warranted, so hope your not expecting too much from my number one performance rule. Oh, Ok then, here goes …

“All numbers in stored-procedures should be in single quotes”.

Even if they are defined as INT they could potentially force a VARCHAR to be converted to INT.

Consider WHERE SomeColumn = 42. Conversion precedency means VARCHAR’s will always be converted to INT’s never the other way around. The one numeric value above (42) could cause a million rows in the column (“SomeColumn”) to have to be converted to INT to be tested. Significantly affecting performance.

Consider WHERE SomeColumn = ’42’. “SomeColumn” is either numeric or non-numeric. If its INT then just one value (the ’42’ in the where clause) has to be converted to INT (taking no time at all). If “SomeColumn” is VARCHAR then there is no conversion.

Exporting a Report to Excel

Finance wanted to export their reports into spread sheets but the company Logo and report Title were messing up the rendering.

To fix this I amended the SQL Server 2012 SSRS config file (called “rsreportserver.config“) after taking a copy.

The location of the config file was …

C:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS11.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer

I commented out the line … (please note: I have replaced the greater-than and less-than symbols with square brackets. WordPress does not like those symbols in posts)

[Extension Name="EXCELOPENXML" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ExcelOpenXmlRenderer.ExcelOpenXmlRenderer,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ExcelRendering"/]

… and replaced it with these 7 lines …

[Extension Name="EXCELOPENXML" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ExcelOpenXmlRenderer.ExcelOpenXmlRenderer,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ExcelRendering"]
	[Configuration]
		[DeviceInfo]
			[SimplePageHeaders]True[/SimplePageHeaders]
		[/DeviceInfo]
	[/Configuration]
[/Extension]

To use this, I moved the report Logo and Title into a heading-block within the reports.

** UPDATE **

On another occasion I was unable to make this global change and resorted to making changes within individual reports.

The method was to right-click on the items to be hidden, choose properties, then Visibility. I pasted this expression into the appropriate box …

=IIF(Globals!RenderFormat.Name = "EXCELOPENXML", True, False)

 

AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Terms (SQL Server 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017 Enterprise)

AG = Availability Group = AlwaysOn Availability Group = SQL Server technology that protects one or more databases on a SQL Server instance as a logical group, for HA or DR.

Node = A Windows Server participating in an AG.

SQL Server Instance = A complete installation of SQL Server. Including user databases, system databases, logins, linked servers, jobs etc. A single default-instance plus a number of named-instances could be installed on one node.

Replica = the user database(s) being protected by an AG.

 

List (high level)

Configure Always On (Operating System)
– Enable windows clustering on each node
– Add participating nodes to cluster
– Validate cluster
– Create cluster
– Multi-subnet?

Configure Availability Groups (SQL Server)
– Enable AG on each SQL Server instance through config manager
– Create endpoint on each replica
– Grant connect on each endpoint/replica
– Create an AG (primary replica)
– Join each secondary to the new AG (secondary replicas)

Configure Databases (Database)
– Join database to AG
– Configure synchronous / asynchronous replication
– Configure manual / auto failover
– Configure read only / non read only secondary

Configure the Listener (Availability Group)
– Select IP for each subnet
– Configure listener
– Test listener
– Test failover

Configure Advanced Options
– Read only routing
– Offloading backups
– Failover behavior
– setup monitoring

Add a Column to a Report Model

I had the odd request to add an extra column to a SQL 2008r2 “Report Model”. I had never heard of one of those, but it turned-out to be a type of amalgamated data-source that the users created there own ad-hock reports from (via Report Builder 1).

To add the extra column I just added it to the SQL View (which was named in the amalgamated data-source definition). Then to refresh the Report Model I downloaded it and uploaded it with a new name.