Articles

SSIS Skip Blank Rows in Flat File Source

: Category: SQL Server Integration Services; 23 April 2013; Hits: 63979

What?
This is a quick article to remind me on how to skip blank rows when using a Flat file as a data source. I would receive another Microsoft error as clear as mud:

Error: The conditional operation failed.

Error: SSIS Error Code DTS_E_INDUCEDTRANSFORMFAILUREONERROR.  The "component 
"MyDerivedColumns" (4228)" failed because error code 0xC0049063 occurred, and the error
row disposition on "output column "DC_MyDate" (7349)" specifies failure on error. An 
error occurred on the specified object of the specified component.  There may be error 
messages posted before this with more information about the failure.

Why?
So the solution must be obvious to you by now. At least that's what Microsoft people think to themselves every time they see the error they programmed in.

Apparently this problem also happens when you have a Data File of varying column numbers. My solution below will also fix this.

How?

: Category: SQL Server Integration Services; 04 April 2013; Hits: 41487

What?
A quick article on how to skip rows or even specify a range to extract from the Excel file when using as the DataSource.

Why?
If you are simply using a text file as your data source, then the options in the connection manager will let you skip rows and specify column datatypes. You don't get that with Excel but you can still control the data range.

How?
My example is that I have an excel sheet where the first 10 rows are descriptions to the column, and then I have 38 columns ("A" to "AL"):

: Category: SQL Server Integration Services; 14 March 2013; Hits: 82120

What?
Please note: the following article is not a solution but a page of various methods and date conversions which I try and use depending on the situation.

This is a quick article on how I got time conversion working in an SSIS package which read from a text file. Note that the example below converts a string in European Date Format (ie. "ddmmyyyy" to "dd/mm/yyyy"). Also, my data flow imports two dates one which was imported as a string (DT_WSTR) and another as a integer (DT_R8).

Why?
It took me a long time to figure this and it was only by trawling through columns that someone mentioned that maybe all the data in that column is not consistent? This made sense as I need to parse the string to extrapolate the date, month and year.

How?

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 15 April 2014; Hits: 18288

Applies to:

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2012
Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Premium
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise

What?
So I have a column in an SSRS report which displays a date. Being rather pernickety, I would like a question mark to display if there is no date to populate the field.

Why?
At the moment, the expression in there is something like this:

=Format(Fields!MyCompletionTime.Value, "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss")
-- yields 11/02/2014 11:21:32

Sounds good, where's the problem?

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 11 April 2014; Hits: 17811

What?
This article describes a solution our reporting server administrators found to cut the loading time of the first report of the day.

Why?
Take any SSRS report, if one of us was the first to run it on that day, it would take an additional 60 seconds to get with it and display the report. Any subsequent running of the report loaded it almost immediately.

How?

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 08 April 2014; Hits: 32898

Applies to:

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2008 R2
Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
Microsoft Business Intelligence Development Studio

What?
I recently revamped our standard report with a new template comprising of a single Tablix which contained the images of the corners and sides of the report. It looked beautiful if simply displayed on a single page (the top half of the page) as long as the end-user doesn't scroll. If the page was scrolled, what should display went behind my report and instead the whole report acted as a header on top of the scrolling content and would only ever display, the top rows of the dataset.

Why?
A lot of articles out there on the net are offering solutions that do the exact opposite. Basically, I want the opposite result of "Fixed headers while scrolling".

How?

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 08 April 2014; Hits: 26800

What?
Sounds easy but actually if you use an image which has transparent areas, ie. has one color which will be transparent, the transparent pixels will be colored in with the page background color.

Why?
I want an image to display per row as a status marker for 3 different types of results: Success, Failure, Unknown. My images are circles with the background being transparent. I want the first column to display an image based on the status result.

If I simply insert an image, the report would use the background color of the report.
How?

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 07 March 2014; Hits: 39005

What?
This article details a method we used on a search form in a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environment. The requirement (amongst others) was that the report ran in less than a few seconds.

Analyzing the report through the ReportServer databases (internal auditing) only showed how long the SQL query would take to recover the data and present it in a report, which would average about 0.4 seconds.

We're obviously not interested in shaving off time from 0.4 seconds; no, we're more interested in the fact that 0.4 Microsoft seconds seems to translate to about 10 minutes in the real world. Where do the extra 9 minutes come from? Not the SQL as this runs in 00:00 seconds in SQL Server Management Studio. Not the internal processing and rendering as the report server says it did this in 0.4 seconds. So where's the problem?

How?

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