John Gallardo's Weblog

You know the one. You try to render a report and you end up hitting the dreaded "An internal catalog exception has occurred" error message. Generally speaking, this is an indication that something very bad happened within the server which is not necessarily...

Recently I have had a couple of people send questions directly to me via the " Email " tab asking me for some specific one-on-one technical support for Reporting Services. I thank you very much for your interest in our product, but unfortunately I am...

The SSRS Web Server supports two basic protocols, SOAP and URL Access. The SOAP API is great for managing the catalog and doing some session management within the context of a report session, but is generally not the greatest thing in the world when actually...

SQL Server Express with Advanced Services SP1 shipped a while ago and it includes Reporting Services. There is a bit of an annoying issue though. In the Express SKU, the database engine automatically creates databases with AutoClose on. This behavior...

Reporting Services has a notion of a user session. This is not the same as ASP.Net's notion of a user session, and in fact the two are completely orthogonal to each other. SSRS's session maintains information about which report a user is looking at, the...

rsReportNotReady is only supposed to be thrown when a report is configured to run from an execution snapshot, and the execution snapshot has not yet been created. It is a pretty rare occurrence and the whole error code is really meant to cover the small...

The Windows Live folks just released Windows Live Writer . It's a tool which runs on your desktop and lets you publish blog entries to a bunch of different weblog formats. This is a test post on my MSDN blog. So far I think it is pretty cool. It autodetected...

Steve Jones recently interviewed me for a regular column he has on sqlservercentral.com . Check it out! http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/sqlserverspotlightonjohngallardo.asp

The answer, is quite simply "No." Someone shot a post from Google Groups through my inbox this morning where some people were having problems with session timeouts (they were seeing rsExecutionNotFound exceptions). Their "solution" was to edit the...

Windows Authentication is good stuff, and rightly so many people are using it in their Reporting Services deployments. Lately, there has been quite a rash of questions that people have regarding the inability to connect to their data sources when using...

Couple of changes since we shipped SQL Server 2005. I have moved from the Relational Engine team over to Reporting Services. Its interesting to see the product from a completely different end. At any rate, if you are actually reading this thing then you...

http://blogs.msdn.com/alanga/archive/2006/01/25/517675.aspx Alan is a good friend of mine that works on Expression Interactive Designer. They have a CTP that was just released (downloading it now). Hi Alan!

The Performance Optimizations for XML Data Type in SQL Server 2005 whitepaper written by Shankar gives some pretty good advice for writing your XQuery statements so that they take advantage of an available XML Index. However, oftentimes you will have...

Usually there are a couple of scenarios in which you want to take XML data and convert it into a regular relational rowset. In SQL 2000, you probably used OpenXML for this, which works pretty well if you are only working on a single piece of XML data...

Ian Jose, an Architect here in SQL Engine working on the Query Optimizer, has just started a blog . Lots of good tips and practical advice for getting the most out of SQL Server's query optimizer.

XML Schema has an interesting feature where you can define a value as being "fixed" . The meaning here is basically that an attribute or element has to have a particular value, and if it is not there in the instance, then that value is implied. However...

http://microsoftgadgets.com/default.aspx The "gadgets" folks have updated their blog to include some gadgets that you can add to start.com . I'm trying out the "Flickr" gadget as well as the "to-do" list gadget. Are you using start.com yet?

A little while ago I threw out this quiz regarding XML and SQL Server 2005's full text search support. As I stated in the quiz, there is a subtle difference between what you can get with contains() and the fulltext support. Specifically, the difference...

Jinghao (my manager here in the SQL Server Engine team) has started up a blog about SQL Server . His blog is targetting Chinese speakers. However, if you are like me and don't read Chinese you can get the fish to translate it for you .

This one is making the rounds here at work. In case you don't recognize the name, he is the guy who made the Lord of the Rings movies. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/news/2005/1004-x05showcase.htm Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Worldwide Marketing...

Using SQL Server's fulltext engine is a great way to optimize your XQuery statements which use XQuery's contains function in a predicate . However, a bit of care has to be taken, because sometimes you might get results which you don't quite expect. ...

The XQuery/XPath 2.0 functions and operators specification defines a function called “contains.” It performs a substring match on the two input strings and returns true if the value of the 2nd string is contained in the value of the 1st string. An example...

http://blogs.msdn.com/weix/archive/2005/09/13/464907.aspx Wei mentions a couple of optimizations that can be made for TEMPDB heavy applications. Since XML datatype uses TEMPDB heavily for LOB storage, I recommend checking this out and instrumenting...

People used to write "Hello, World!" applications in order to demo new languages and technologies. It seems that all of the demos de jour are RSS applications. Well, in order to continue the trend, I have decided to write a quick RSS reader which uses...

This might be long, so I am going to cut to the chase right now. If you are using predicates which involve non-string types in your XQuery statements, you want to use typed data. There, I said it. Now lets try to figure out why. The issue basically...