What an Amazing Run!

Today is a special day for me - it is my consulting team’s last day on our current project.  I have been working on this OI (operation intelligence) project for more than 15 months.  I do not recall being on a lengthier consulting engagement anywhere else. 

The project has indeed come a long way - several personnel changes, three reorganizations, and a complete management change-over.  I remember we started out with the inheritance of one DW.  Since then we have built and implemented a few more, and acquired a dozen more as a result of our more recent restructure.  (Yes, we operate as many disparate DW's as the systems we source from.)  Despite the increase in scope, we have largely maintained about the same level of resources this whole time.  I guess we are managing it somehow.

Nonetheless, it has been an rewarding challenge and a great learning experience.  I know what I am going to miss the most is the smart and driven people I work with. 

Files in RSTempFiles Directory

Nothing beats running into a production issue starting the work week. One of our SSRS servers encountered an assembly loading error early this morning – making the reports unavailable to our users. The error was caused by the fact that the disk it is running on did not have enough space.

It happened that the volume of the content in the Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.#\Reporting Services\RSTempFiles directory has grown over time and ultimately filled up the disk. Unlike SSRS logs (in the LogFiles directory), these temporary snapshots are not being cleaned up automatically. The "CleanupCycleMinutes" setting in RSReportServer.config appears to work only with storage in database – not file system.

In the interest of getting SSRS back online ASAP, we manually deleted the older snapshot files - reclaiming a decent chunk of space. Going forward, we will need to put in place a script or some sort to automatically and regularly keep the directory clean. Sounds like an action item.

SSIS Raw File Reader

Several months ago while I was working a solution to move data across network domains, I came across this nifty utility called “Raw File Reader.” This tool allows me to read and view the data contained in raw files produced by SSIS. It is currently a freeware and more information can be found at http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2007/01/11/SSIS-Rawfile-viewer---now-available.aspx .