SQL Reporting Services: The report server installation is not initialized. (rsReportServerNotActivated)

May 28th, 2008 Russell

Yesterday, my buddy Amit Panchal and I were trying to get an x64 instance of SSRS joined to reporting farm, and had a bear of a time.

Because of issues I won’t get into here, we were trying to initialize the server in the “classic” way - meaning we had exported our encryption key from one of the other nodes, copied it to the new machine and were trying to apply it locally, ala:

RSKeyMgmt.exe -a -f C:\Keys.snk -p password!

We kept on getting the error:  The report server installation is not initialized. (rsReportServerNotActivated)

We spent a couple hours trying to troubleshoot this using RsKeyMgmt -j, trying the same thing in the SSRS config tool, and so on. Still, we had no luck.

On a lark, we re-exported the key from the same server as before, copied it over and tried again. It worked like a charm! Next, we tried the old key again, and splat, same error. Moral of the story is that it appears every now and then your key might get munged during the export and/or copy process. 

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PeformancePoint Analytic Grid & localization

May 22nd, 2008 Russell

If you have taken the time to implement translations in your SSAS cube, it is comforting to know that the Analytic Grid can and will display your localized text.

From what I can gather, we aren’t quite smart enough to simply read regional settings on the client (as defined in Control Panel | Regional Settings) and run with them like we can when leveraging Excel 2007. Instead, you must set the language in question in Internet Explorer ala:

Tools | Internet Options | Languages (button)

You’ll need to add the language you want the grid localized in to the “language list”, and then move it to the top of the list. Clear your browser cache, and you should be ready to rock and roll.

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Speeding up SQL Analysis Services DSV table selection against Teradata

May 20th, 2008 Russell

A couple of days ago I needed to create a new DSV against a Teradata source. I found that the “lag” in the normally light-on-its feet DSV wizard was pretty bad - it took in the neighborhood of 1.5 minutes for the Add Related Tables function to return when I tried it against FactResellerSales (I have AdventureWorks DW loaded up in Teradata).

I was lucky to be in a LiveMeeting with some guys from Teradata who watched me struggle through this process, and they gave me some hints to make my life better - well, my data-related life, anyway:

• Use the .NET provider for Teradata version 12  (I was using the latest 8.1 Provider)
• In the data source for the project, make sure to set the database name you are connecting to in the Database property found in the All properties dialog
• In the same All properties list for the provider, set Use X Views to false

These three changes dropped my “wait time” from 1.5 minutes to 11 seconds. Can’t wait to see if queries against my ROLAP partitions come back more quickly.

Thanks Teradata guys!

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Does SQL Server Reporting Services execute queries sequentially or in parallel?

May 20th, 2008 Russell

I saw an interesting thread today I thought I would pass along. In essence, one of my colleagues wanted to know if the twenty-ish queries behind his SSRS report would all fire at the same time, or sequentially.

The answer is (of course, we’re Microsoft) “it depends”. Robert Bruckner from the SSRS product team pointed to the “Use Single Transaction” option on the data source properties dialog in Report Designer. If  this option is enabled (it’s disabled by default), then we run queries sequentially. If the option is disabled, we run in parallel assuming we have available threads in the SSRS thread pool.

Interesting stuff!

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