tudortr has some tips on measuring and improving Reporting Services performance. I heartily agree with number 1: optimise your queries. I've found that using a) proper indexes and b) creating intermediate tables where necessary (possibly containing summarised data from a month that is reported in many different reports, rather than going to the transaction-level original data table, for instance) are the best things I can do to improve performance on my reports.

Stefano and Girish inform us that the official Windows Media Center theme (called Royale) can be used on Windows XP. Cool! I like tweaking my colors but am not willing to load themes from 3rd-party sites on my work PC (or don't want to get busted), so it's nice to have an option. There's instructions on where to copy the theme to in the RAR file, which can be downloaded from Winbeta. UPDATE: Stefano alerts us that the theme has been officially released (called “Energy Blue“), and can be got here. You'll have to extract the relevant files with WinRAR and copy them...

Reporting Services SP1 is installed, the installation went really well, and one feature that was in the beta is back: Excel "groups" (the plus/minus rollups in Excel). Believe it or not, this was one of the things that got my boss excited about Reporting Services as many of our managers are familiar with Excel, and when it dropped off in the RTM I had to go through and create some copies of reports specifically for an Excel export. One strange thing is that there seems to be at least two means of creating expandable groups/hiding report items in the designer,...

As promised by Microsoft, covered by many many others, and incidently delivered right on time, Reporting Services Service Pack 1 is now available. I'm getting ready to load it up over the next couple of days. The big thing we've been waiting on is better Excel support (for versions prior to 2002) and grouping in Excel (which was in the beta, but pulled for the final product). The main gripe I'm hearing from my users is not being able to print directly from Internet Explorer. I believe it's got something to do with IFRAMEs, and the workaround I'm offering is to export...

As part of a weekly database job that runs out-of-hours, I re-index all the tables in a particular reporting database. After playing around with index fillfactor I arrived at a fill factor of 90 as the tables are mostly being read and only being updated a couple of times a month. For my key tables, I made sure I set up clustered indexes on the fields that were being used most commonly in my queries (which of course speeds data access up considerably) I discovered a simple script that would rebuild indexes on all tables in a database to have a fill...

Here's my brief overview of Tuesday's Melbourne SQL Server SIG on "Replication Lessons from the Real World", presented by Adam Thurgar at Microsoft Melbourne Offices on Chapel Street: Adam did a great job presenting the topic (which I have absolutely zero prior experience with), and quickly established his credibility by talking about the work he does with Match.com and it's 90GB database (leaves my largest, at 2GB, looking pretty pathetic). Adam spoke candidly about problems he'd encountered and alluded to several improvements in Yukon, all the while infusing his talk with humour and trying to keep the audience involved. His presentation...

Tonight is the Melbourne SQL Server SIG on replication, presented by Adam Thurgar. Replication is not something I know a great deal about - I'm hoping to learn ways to sync our production and development servers as currently I use multiple DTS jobs coded by hand and scheduled with SQL Server Agent. The DTS/SQL Agent approach is very flexible, but I want simple: whenever a new table is added, data is synchronised, and the two servers are kept exactly the same. Hopefully replication is the answer! I've printed an article from DatabaseJournal called Setting Up Merge Replication: A Step-by-step Guide to...

Recently I had a problem that I needed to update my stored procedures to point at a new set of tables. I systematically worked through my 3 stored procedures for populating the tables, but I couldn't remember all the stored procedures that accessed them for data retrieval. Enter information_schema.routines and a tip from Experts Exchange:select * from information_schema.routines where routine_definition like '%yourtablename%' The downside is that this searches the stored procedure text (well, the first 4000 characters in the routine_definition column) for the table name, so you'll get hits even where the table name is used in a comment. The upside is...

From Brendan, a great step-by-step post on the MS Application Updater block, which I had downloaded months ago and have sitting around for when my app gets closer to deployment (in a month or so). I also use the Data Access Application Block (V2, currently, as SQL Server support is all I need). I passed over the error logging Application Block in favor of log4net which more than meets the requirements I've got.

Ohad has a list of Reporting Services links that look interesting.

While I'm thinking of GUIs, the GUI Olympics (which has to do with skins, rather than full-blown widgets and interfaces) produced some nice looking interfaces. When I ran Mandrake at home I was pleased with the amount of customisation that could be done, being the tweaker that I am.

It's a little out-of-date, but the Isys Information Architectssite has a whole lot of examples of good (Hall of Fame) and bad (Hall of Shame) GUIs, dialog boxes and "features" (from I don't know where).

Via Early Adopter comes new of an Microsoft SQL Server Developer Centre with the standard articles, downloads and KB's, but also links to blogs and an RSS feed.

Obligatory first post - my name is Thomas Williams, I'm a Melbourne, Australia-based senior systems analyst working mainly with SQL Server (and Analysis Services, Reporting Services) and VB.NET. I'm 30 years old, and I'm looking forward to sharing what I've got with anyone who might be interested! I've been reading blogs for a year or so now, and writing my own personal blog at http://thomasswilliams.blogspot.com/ since September 2004.

My musings on the May SQL Server SIG in Melbourne, Australia (a few days late)... The RundownI went to a Special Interest Group meeting at Microsoft in Melbourne a couple of weeks back. I had seen the presenter, Jason Buck, before and once again he demonstrated how well he knew the product (assisted by David from MS and Greg, a consultant tasked with "..extracting out of the community...expertise..."). There were lots of people there (more than I'd seen at an SQL Server SIG before), which is a good indicator of the poularity of this add-on to SQL Server 2000 - I know...