What?
This is an article to demonstrate a quick step-by-step on having an SSIS package loop through a directory/folder of files in order to populate a database table. We could add each file as a separate connection manager but this is inefficient and not versatile enough to accommodate files that get added later.

Why?
I am creating an extract SSIS package intended to take a text file as its source and to populate a database table with this data. Note that this only works if all the text files to be used as source data have the same number of columns and where the column widths match.

How?
I've adapted my real working product with an example. As my work was for a Personnel/HR project, and data confidentiality is somewhat important, some of the images will be censored or data changed in the example below.

What?
A quick article on an alternative to multiple lookups in SSIS. For any SSIS developer trying to create packages that need to decode a number of values into their full name/description (eg. "M" to "Male", "Prof" to "Professor").

Why?
Our extract phase in the SSIS package takes data from a source database and puts it in staging in the exact form it came through. Our transform package will convert the data and output it to the target system. For our package to decode what "M" means, it needs to look this up in a table on the original server. We had around 12 lookups to do, so you could do this:
But we didn't want to do this.

How?

The Situation
We want some photos taken from another website of ours to display in our report. These are not stored locally on the Reporting Server because other services use these photos on our Intranet and we only want one location to upload the photos. These images are provided via a website address (http) or network share (file).

Before you ask, we have several MS Sharepoint sites but we didn't go down the route of uploading 10000+ images into a Sharepoint database though we are still considering it; so this article is more about just getting external images to display when they are provided over an authenticated URL (You shouldn't be having any issues with this if the image is available to anonymous users - eg. Google Logo).

Our Setup

1. Windows XP Workstation
2. Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS)
3. SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Server (SSRS) running on Windows Server 2003
4. Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS)

Problem #1: Image does not appear within SSRS
When previewing the report in BIDS, the photo appears fine. If we deploy the report to our Reporting Server and attempt to view it using a Web-Browser, the image does not display:

1. Get report to see images hosted on an external URL
2. Check if image exists to display alternative placeholding image.

Quick Reminder
I didn't want to do this at the database level, mainly because it meant modifying the SQL query. The zero padding would need to be applicable within an MDX query.

The Situation
We have a database using Oracle 10g, and a SQL Server Reporting Services v2008 R2 environment. My use for this was when displaying an audit log displaying the oracle errors.

Oracle Errors
An Oracle error usually returns in the format of -12345. If we want to look them up the error is ORA-12345. Unfortunately Oracle also returns errors of less than 10000 so ORA-00201 would actually be returned as "-201". As I wanted a link so that the user can just click on this link and it would take them to http://ora-00201.ora-code.com/.

The Issue

After modifying a report and on running it, Report Builder 2.0 returns the following error:

An error occurred during local report processing.
An error has occurred during report processing.
Query execution failed for dataset 'DataSet1'.
The variable name '@GroupName' has already been declared.  Variable names must be unique within a query batch or stored procedure.

Yes, well don't laugh, I could not find this on the WWW so I was obviously not using Google properly.  Anyway here's just a quick note on how to do if else statements in Report Builder 2.0

I'm looking at the following if statement:

If (MyFieldName = 0) Then
     Return 1
Else
     Return MyFieldName

Can be expressed as:

IIf(Fields!MyFieldName.Value = 0, 1, Fields!MyFieldName.Value)

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• SQL Server 2008
• Report Builder 2.0
• BMC Service Desk Express 9.8

• Incident #
• Group Name
• Close Date & Time
• Assigned to Full Name
• Incident Type

Basically I thought that the regional settings of a report generated using Report Builder 2.0 on a MS SQL Server 2008 instance were dependent on either the server or the client machine.  Realised that this was actually specified in the report. Here's a quick note on how to set Dates and Times used in parameter fields to UK format (dd/MM/yyyy).