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  • SSMS 21 Initial Impressions

    I’ve been using SSMS 21 for the last fortnight and below are my first impressions, I’ve used SSMS in its many forms since around 2006 not long after it was first released. The new connection dialog The new connection dialog is very similar to the connection dialog box in Azure Data Studio (which has also…

  • Tracking database growth with Power BI

    The guide below shows how to implement stored procedures that will monitor the disk space used by your databases and their tables.  Giving an understanding of areas utilising storage and the rate of storage consumption, allowing planning and monitoring, helping to limit the likelihood of that moment when the database grows and runs out of…

  • Monitoring identity fields in SQL Server

    A common issue that I’ve encountered and certainly more than once, is where database inserts fail due to incorrectly sized identity fields. This is caused by the data type and its associated numerical limit being unable to store the next number in the identity sequence (known as the seed). This is easily resolved by changing…

  • Oracle Date comparison – DATEDIFF

    Many databases are designed in such a way that where a start/end time are stored there is no corresponding duration value, this is to avoid obvious data duplication and storage space as the duration can be calculated by comparing the start/end times. However some novice SQL coders struggle to calculate durations. In Microsoft SQL there…

  • Oracle SQL – Formatting dates into a more usable form (TO_CHAR)

    Dates in oracle are stored in a format that doesn’t always make them friendly from a reporting point of view or dealing with data in Excel point of view, the TO_CHAR function can reformat your datetime fields so that they are more user friendly. Examples The statement is written with two parameters the exact name…

  • SSRS Error – There was an exception running the extensions specified in the config file. —> Maximum request length exceeded

    Hopefully this can help someone else out that has this issue, I had the error “Error 1 There was an exception running the extensions specified in the config file. —> Maximum request length exceeded” displayed when publishing what I believed was a relatively straight forward SSRS report. Upon googling most of the solutions tended to…

  • SSRS Series – How to format addresses in SSRS

    There are two ways to approach msaaging/formatting fields into an address block in SSRS, you can either carry out your formatting in the SQL that populates the dataset or you can format the fields from the dataset in an SSRS expression. I’ve found that the easiest method is to format the address through an SSRS…

  • SSRS – SUM IF

    I wrote this guide around 14 years ago after having nothing but problems with Microsoft Business Intelligence Development Studio for around 7 hours, so thought I’d post the solution to save someone else the hassle! Problem When using groupings in a table, an expression consisting of a SUM and an immediate if (IIF) can be…