SQL Server 2008 RTM’d yesteday. Now I gotta rebuild all my demos!

August 7th, 2008 Russell

Sheesh, take a day off from reading mail and you miss the chance to blog about one of the most important products on the day it RTMs. I’m a day late and a dollar short, but SQL 2008 released yesterday. It is build 1600.22, and I see it is already out on MSDN. It also appears to be available on connect.microsoft.com for TAP customers.

My next project is to install on PPS on a Windows 2008 VPC runing SQL 2008 and see what happens. I know neither of those are supported yet, but it appears that I should be able to get it to work using a couple of tricks.

I’ll post more details later!

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PerformancePoint Server SP1: It’s here! It’s here!

June 4th, 2008 Russell

The wait is over! Download yours now! I’m giggling like a little girl!

Details about the release may be found here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx 

..and of course, the distros:

Enterprise Version 32-bit: 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28B1F86B-B7F2-4215-8BC9-8F8507FF8831&displaylang=en

Enterprise Version 64-bit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6245C354-9191-4C4D-8C0C-C10D6C778AF8&displaylang=en

Evaluation Version 32-bit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6372C24F-67DD-42DD-B034-748907B23420&displaylang=en

Evaluation Version 64-bit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ADAC793-DEF0-4BA8-A9AB-228979B8DB40&displaylang=en

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Is PerformancePoint SP1 supported on SQL 2008? No, but…

June 4th, 2008 Russell

Now that SP1 has hit, I bet a lot of people are wondering about SP1 / SQL Server 2008 compatability. In fact, the PPS Help and How To page hints at same, saying (bold is mine):

PerformancePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) includes enhancements such as improved query performance, increased compatibility with Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, additional data sources, and more filtering capabilities for reports and dashboards

So, is PPS SP1 officially supported with SQL Server 2008? No. The product team made it clear that we can’t support a product which hasn’t even been released yet - makes sense to me!  Offical support won’t happen until PerformancePoint SP2 hits (no, I don’t know the timeline on that).

That doesn’t mean PPS SP1 won’t work against SQL 2008, however. The product team did test the products together, and they do get along quite well. (Sorry, I don’t have a list of specific functionality that either works or doesn’t)

I’m writing this before SP1 actually released, so I expect to update this post after I get my hands on the readme.

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PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning data migration tool released

June 2nd, 2008 Russell

Barry Tousley, an SDET on the PerformancePoint Server team has released a tool to help you do PPS planning data  migration.

You can find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FA1C6CAD-45BD-4E5C-A257-4BBA84FA4224&displaylang=en

Information on the tool itself is here

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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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