Arnie Rowland just sent me an email informing me about this great give-back-to-the-community initiative. Many MVPs, including Arnie Rowland, Denny Cherry, Bill Graziano, Bill Simser, Paul Turley (whose sessions I attended last SQLPASS 2009)

Here is a quote from Arnie’s blog post :

“We are inviting unemployed or underemployed developers to propose a software project for a non-profit agency, school, or church.

The idea is that we will provide a package of the latest software, tools, and training resources to help you improve your skills, get up to date with current technologies, gain practical experience, potentially earn a recommendation for your efforts, and in general, enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something useful for others.

We are not giving out a ‘free lunch’, just supporting your efforts to personally gain from your own ‘sweat equity’.

The software, books, training and development tools are valued at over $15,000!

I think this is an excellent initiative, and will definitely help motivate developers to improve their skills and their toolsets. Think about it. If you’re an aspiring developer, you can also get the chance to have hands on practical experience – at the same time having the chance to get geeky feel-good goodies! C’mon, free books? Who can refuse that? (not me. I always have room in my bookshelf for free books. @BrentO (twitter | blog), by the way, I will need your autograph in my SQL Server Internals and Troubleshooting book. I will bring it in November!

So here’s what you need to do:
1. If you’re unemployed or underemployed, start looking for a non-profit project (see requirements in Arnie’s blog), and join.
2. If you’re neither unemployed nor underemployed – help spread the word.
3. If you’re neither unemployed nor underemployed – and you’re an MVP – sponsor
4. If you’re not interested, or you don’t care – just spread the word too. You’ll earn brownie points – somewhere.

Details are in Arnie’s blog: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/arnie_rowland/archive/2010/07/02/there-will-be-no-free-lunch-just-great-feelings-of-accomplishment.aspx

Had a very long week, but nothing like some humor to end the week on a high note

penny arcade – girls dig RAM

by the way, the bigger girl geeks dig the Apple iPad and the macbook pros

sudo

xkcd – regex

this one’s for ya, @GFritchey – (ScaryDBA)

Just wanted to share some common “tips” or “tricks” I find myself using over and over again when creating reports.

I think I’ve had this draft for a while, and just never was able to publish it because things got so busy. Anyway, I will just publish in parts. Better late (and something) than never (and nothing!)

Common Report Tasks

Common page headers and footers

Report (reportname) generated by DOMAIN/User on 02/03/2010 4:51:03 PM
="Report (" & Globals!ReportName & ") generated by " & User!UserID & " on " & Globals.ExecutionTime"

Page X of Y
="Page " & Globals!PageNumber & " of " & Globals!TotalPages

If you have start and end date parameters, and want to display them in your header or footer, with date formatted as MMM dd, YYYY
="Report Details from " & Format(Parameters!StartDate.Value, "MMM dd, yyyy") & " to " & Format(Parameters!EndDate.Value, "MMM dd, yyyy")

Read the rest of this entry »

Just blogged on the Black Ninja Site:

Programmatically and Selectively Revoke SharePoint Item Level Permissions Using PowerShell

These two books are great, and they almost never leave my desk. I’ve been reading them nonstop.

Prologika Press. Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services by Teo Lachev

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports by Paul Turley and Robert M. Bruckner

Report Parts : New in SSRS 2008 R2

There is a good preliminary documentation on building Report Parts in MSDN:
Publishing Report Parts in Report Builder 3.0 – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633670%28v=SQL.105%29.aspx

The Good

As per the MSDN documentation, it’s good to know that the following items can now be “reused” across different reports:
• Charts
• Gauges
• Images
• Maps
• Parameters
• Rectangles
• Tables
• Matrices
• Lists

The Not-So-Good-Yet

It seems very limiting to me, though, that Report Parts can only be created/published from Report Builder 3.0. As someone who works almost 100% using BIDS, I think having to switch tools to just be able to publish a report part will definitely affect my report writing momentum. And by switching tools I mean, creating the report in BIDS, deploying to the Report Server, navigating to that site, and then editing that report in Report Builder 3.0. That’s quite a few extra steps …

Also, I would have loved to be able to publish a report header and footer as report parts. Unfortunately the current CTP version does not support it.

Creating your first Report Part

Download document/screenshots: Exploring SSRS 2008 R2 Report Builder 3.0 – Report Parts

For this mini tutorial I am going to assume you have created your report in BIDS 2008.

1. Deploy your report to the report server.

2. Go to that report. Hover over the report name, and click on the down arrow to reveal the contextual dropdown. Select Edit in Report Builder

3. Once Report Builder opens, go to the Report Builder main button (I think it looks like a scroll), and select Publish Report Parts.

4. In the Publish Report Parts window, select Review and modify report parts before publishing (unless you really want to publish all report parts with default settings)

5. In the next window, select which Report Parts you want to publish. Put a description too, makes it easier for your Report Builder users to identify report parts later on.

6. When you’re done, click on Publish. Note there is no dialog box notifying you that publishing is done. All you get are the green checkmarks beside the report parts you selected, and the message at the bottom of the Publish Report Parts dialog box saying how many report parts were published, and how many failed.

7. If this is the first time you published a Report Part, a new Report Part folder will be created in your report server.

8. Inside the Report Part folder are your published report parts. Note that the icon of the report parts give it away – puzzle pieces! Also note that when you hover over a report part and click on the down arrow, you will reveal the contextual menu for a report part (move, delete, security, manage and download).

That’s it! That’s how you publish your report parts using Report Builder 3.0! Pretty nifty, eh?

Report Part Gallery

Inside the Report Builder 3.0, you will also see the Report Part Gallery tab, which will list all available Report Parts you can add to your report.

Report Part Updates

It is also important to note that if any report parts get updated, the reports that use that report part will display a notice when opened in Report Builder. It will tell you that the published report part(s) have been updated on the server.

Once you choose to view changes, you can select which report parts you want to update.

And once it’s updated, no in-your-face notice again that the update was successful. It’s still just that subtle green checkmark beside the report part you chose to update.

Download document/screenshots: Exploring SSRS 2008 R2 Report Builder 3.0 – Report Parts

I’ve been out of the twitter loop for a while, running around trying to meet deadlines. Sadly I missed this whole saga, but thanks to Brent’s post, I’m caught up.

Read. And learn.

Plagiarism, Inspiration, and John Dunleavy – http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/03/plagiarism-inspiration-and-john-dunleavy/

My students can attest that the one single thing they can do on their assignments that will guarantee huge mark deductions is – NO PROPER CITATIONS.

We usually have online discussions in class, and students are asked to post a way to solve a problem, or to post about a new SQL Server feature etc. And I emphasize to them that it doesn’t matter what their answers are, it must have come somewhere. If it’s an article, a blog, a white paper, I need the author, the title, and the link back to that article. If it’s a book, good times but use the traditional citation. If it came from my lecture, or something I said in my lecture, I ask them to put explicitly “Heard from Donabel’s lecture”. If they absolutely thought about it on their own, or just did their own experimentation and never consulted a book, they should still explicitly say the source is them.

It sounds very tedious for a student, but I just want to plant in their minds that in this day and age where information is easily obtained anywhere, I still want them to pause and take the time to acknowledge where they got that information from. (Students usually learn after the first time they get deductions).

Deja Vu

Which reminds me .. I used to mark papers when I was still in school. Caught one of the students plagiarizing really bad – that s/he has copied everything (verbatim) including all the spelling and grammar mistakes. C’mon – that’s just called EMBARRASSING.

I created a 2 part webcast on SQL Server and PowerShell last November/December, and I just wanted to re-post it in my site.

SQL Server PowerShell: Part I

SQL Server PowerShell: Part II