Virtualization is awesome! It really helps when you are a developer. On my laptop I don’t even have SQL Server installed on the OS directly. In fact the only thing I have installed on my host is Office, Skype and Chrome. Everything else gets run on a VM. SSIS package creation using BIDS: VM. SQL Server Management Studio: VM. SharePoint sandbox: VM VPN: VM. One of the advantages of doing...
Mark a Disk Partition as Inactive
If you are like me then you like to reinstall Windows on your laptop every few months to keep things fresh and running smoothly. That or your even more like me and you download some beta version of software and install it on your laptop rather than a VM and screw something up to an unrepairable state. Either way Windows is being reinstalled. I have a laptop without an optical drive in it. The...
SharePoint Reports and Scorecards on Apple Devices
While some people may consider this topic off limits the fact remains that more and more companies are adopting Apple devices, namely the iPad, for use in their organizations. In the last quarterly earnings call from Apple they revealed that more than 80% of fortune 100 companies and more than 60% of fortune 500 companies are now using iOS devices in their organizations. Regardless of the amount...
The 'Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.12.0' Provider Is Not Registered on the Local Machine
If you have used SSIS to move data from something like Access or more commonly Excel, it is a good possibility you have seen this error at some point: Error: The ‘Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.12.0‘ provider is not registered on the local machine. The reason this error shows up is because the proper components are not present that are required to move data from Office files (I’m looking...
PowerPivot Data Connection Error
PowerPivot report returns the following error from Excel Services: The data connection uses Windows Authentication and user credentials could not be delegated. The following connection failed to refresh: PowerPivot Data When viewing a PowerPivot workbook in SharePoint 2010 the report is visualized using Excel Services since ultimately the report is inside an Excel workbook. The root cause of...
Installing SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2012 RC0
With SQL Server 2012 right around the corner and Release Candidate 0 already out there I’m sure you will all want to see the cool new stuff that SharePoint has to offer. There are a number of changes coming to SharePoint with the SQL 2012 release including the much anticipated PowerView. A number of enhancements have been made to the installation process as well as the consolidation of...
Content Shift, Still SQL, Just More SharePoint
Many of you may have notice that I have been a little inconsistent with my posts lately. It’s been a crazy couple of months. I just want to make everyone aware of a couple of things I’m about to do on the blog here. It’s not really going to be anything life-changing but it will affect some of the content. I’m in the process of looking for a new host. If I move that may...
Find Recently Run Queries
If you have ever closed a query window by accident only to wish you could get back your work an instant later you may be in luck. If you ran the query in question there is hope for you. The query below will return queries that have been run for you including the time and query text. I haven’t figured up a way to get the user that executed the query just yet. So if you have that tidbit...
SSIS Variable and Expressions Followup
Over the last week I have done several sessions either for the Pragmatic Works Free Training online or at SQL Saturday. It has been a lot of fun, so thank you to everyone who has come out and hopefully learned something from one of the sessions I have done. So, I mentioned a couple things I was going to do, one of which is post a quick recap and sample package from the Expressions and Variables...
Posting This Week
I just wanted to do a quick post to let everyone know that I am in fact going to be posting the follow up content that I promised in my webinar and at SQL Saturday. It has been a busy busy week and I just haven’t had the time to get to it. Between work, SQL Saturday, some book stuff, traveling and more work I just haven’t gotten around to it. I should have a little bit of free time...
