This made me a little concerned. If there’s no resource and the service fails or crashes would the cluster failover? To test this I logged on to one of the nodes and stopped the service.

Nothing happened.

The service stopped but there was no cluster failover or anything. As the FTS service is critical I thought this would break FTS. To test this out I created a new table, threw in some values and created a new Full-Text Index.

SET NOCOUNT ON;

/* Create the table */

CREATE TABLE test

    (

      c1 INT IDENTITY(1, 1) ,

      c2 NVARCHAR(MAX) DEFAULT 'some text'

    );

/* Add the PK */

ALTER TABLE test ADD CONSTRAINT Test_PK PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (c1);

/* Insert some records so we have something to see */

INSERT  INTO test

        DEFAULT VALUES

GO 500

/* Create the FT catalog and index */

CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG [testft] AS DEFAULT;

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON dbo.test (c2)

KEY INDEX Test_PK;

/* Wait a few seconds for population to take place and then query the FTI */

SELECT TOP 100

        *

FROM    test

WHERE   CONTAINS ( c2, 'text' )

I was expecting this to not work as I’d killed off the service.

Surprisingly I got results. How had that happened?

I went back to the server and found that the FTS service had started back up again. I killed it, ran the select statement again and still got results.

I read the description of the FTS service which states that it will “launch the full-text filter daemon process”. I went in search of that and killed off the fdhost.exe process and once more ran the query. This time I got an error which appears completely unrelated but is caused by the fdhost.exe process not running.

Msg 30053, Level 16, State 102, Line 1
Word breaking timed out for the full-text query string. This can happen if the wordbreaker took a long time to process the full-text query string, or if a large number of queries are running on the server. Try running the query again under a lighter load.

Now FTS was truly dead but I wanted to see if it could be resurrected without any intervention from me.

By default Full-Text indexes are created with automatic change tracking, so I just added a few more rows to the table to see what would happen.

Change tracking kicked in and SQL Server kicked off the FTS service, which in turn launched the fdhost.exe process. With fdhost.exe running I was then able to run the Full-Text query again and return results.

I have to say I was initially freaked out by there not being any kind of resource to manage Full-Text Search but it turns out that you really don’t need one. SQL handles it all behind the scenes for you. Excellent work Microsoft!

Querying sys.databases will give you the owner_sid. The trouble is that you have to relate that owner_sid back to a user. The same with sysjobs, that sid needs to relate to someone.

You could attempt joining against sys.server_principals, however if there’s a user that doesn’t exist or is a part of a domain group they wouldn’t show up and you would just get a NULL returned. Try the following example:

SELECT  d.NAME ,

        sp.NAME

FROM    sys.databases d

        LEFT JOIN sys.server_principals sp ON d.owner_sid = sp.sid;

SELECT  s.NAME ,

        sp.NAME

FROM    msdb.dbo.sysjobs s

        LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.server_principals sp ON s.owner_sid = sp.sid ;     

Now what, how can you quickly and easily get the owner? A little known system function will come to the rescue.

SUSER_SNAME (server_user_sid) will return the login name associated with a SID. Using this you can very quickly grab the information about who owns what without having to play with joins or get incomplete results:

SELECT  name ,

        SUSER_SNAME(owner_sid)

FROM    sys.databases;

SELECT  name ,

        SUSER_SNAME(owner_sid)

FROM    msdb.dbo.sysjobs;

There’s some great little hidden gems lying around in SQL Server like this. You just need to find them.

Here are the relevant details that I need to use to decide how to move the backup files:

1. The servers are in two different datacenters and the WAN link between them is not very fast
2. The backups are stored on a CIFS share that is non-routable for anything other than machines on that VLAN (for security reasons)
3. There is only a single machine in the datacenter that has the ability to reach through the firewall to the development server
4. I had to get the data across the WAN as fast as possible, however did not want to have to babysit what would be a several hour process (it should restarted in the case of any issues)
5. All the hosts involved are running Windows 2008R2 SP1
6. I did not want to install any extra software on any of the servers
7. This is not an ongoing process and so I wanted something quick. No need to try and over-engineer the situation

How to get at the backup

My first thought was to use the improved TCP stack in Windows 2008R2, log on to the development server and pull the data from the CIFS share. Unfortunately this was out as the development machine does not have access to the subnet in order to pull the data.

Next was to perform a backup directly across the WAN to the development machine. This would not work due to firewall restrictions preventing communication between the machines (and this would also not be network optimized)

The only option left was to use the single machine in the datacenter (let’s call this the jump server), on the relevant VLAN, which had access through the firewall to push the backup to the development box.

How to optimize the copy and have it restartable

Opening a terminal server session to the jump server, opening an explorer window to the source and destination, then dragging the file over would copy the file. There have also been reported incidents where using the drag and drop method has caused memory problems (here’s an example from a forum thread http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/3f8a80fd-914b-4fe7-8c93-b06787b03662/ ). This also does not address the concern with automatic restarts for the copy operation.

Opening a terminal server session to the jump server and running copy/xcopy would do the trick. There are no memory issues that I’m aware of with this method. We do have the problem whereby the copy process would not restart in the event of a problem. This method also does not do the best job of managing copies over a network. So this was out.

Opening a terminal server session to the jump server and using robocopy to copy the file made the most sense. Using the additional /r and /w switches you can have the copy process retry as many times as needed and have a defined interval between those retries. Robocopy also has a level of network optimization built in. As a bonus it also provides ongoing information as to the copy completion percentage and details statistics when complete. Robocopy is built in to Windows 2008R2 and so also meets the requirement of not wanting to install any more software.

Final copy solution

In the end I found myself opening up a terminal server remote desktop session to the jump server which had both a route to the backup file and access through the firewall to the development server. From there I used Robocopy to perform the file copy over the WAN, providing the best performance as well as automatic restarts from any failures.

I’m curious, would you have handled this differently?

He was executing a basic sp_configure script to enable CLR, nothing special, no frills.

EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1

RECONFIGURE

When he ran this he was getting an error:

Msg 259, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Ad hoc updates to system catalogs are not allowed.

Most curious. I went back to my machine and wasn’t able to reproduce the problem. Rather than have him attempt to restart his instance I just had him reconfigure with override

EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

This time it ran correctly and gave a good result.

All the “WITH OVERRIDE” does is force SQL to be reconfigured with the updated value (unless it would cause a fatal error). Something to remember if this ever crops up for you.

Either way, we’re performing a server migration and needed to find out all the logins and clients that are connecting to the SQL instance. I also wanted to capture this data to a table to make it easy to report against (eliminating turning on successful logins). The ideal solution for me was to use a logon trigger, and as the instance in question is running SQL 2008 this worked out great.

I created a login, table of holding, table of rollup holding and granted the relevant permissions so that I could capture the data. Then I created the actual login logon trigger itself which captured the logon login, host name, application name and datetime information and logged the data into the table.

I added a procedure and scheduled job to rollup the data nightly so as to prevent the table from getting too large (which would be quite easy to do on a big server).

There are no primary keys and only a single clustered index. It’s all very light. If you are looking to capture logon/login data then this is a good starting point. Code below…

USE master 

go

--create the login which will be used to log the data

CREATE LOGIN LoginLogging WITH PASSWORD = 'somepassword123!@#' ;

GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO LoginLogging ;

--change this to the database of your choosing

USE DBAdmin

go

--create the user matching the login

CREATE USER LogonLogging FOR LOGIN LogonLogging ;

--create the table that will hold the data

CREATE TABLE LogonList

    (

      LoginName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      HostName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      ApplicationName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      LoginDate DATETIME2

    ) ;

CREATE INDEX CI ON dbo.LogonList(LoginDate)

CREATE TABLE LogonListDailyRollup

    (

      LoginName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      HostName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      ApplicationName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      LoginDate DATE,

      LoginCount INT

    ) ;

--allow the login to insert data to the table    

GRANT INSERT ON dbo.LogonList TO LogonLogging ;    

--proc to rollup the data daily to keep space low and ease reporting

CREATE PROCEDURE RollupLogonData

AS

SET NOCOUNT ON

BEGIN TRY

    BEGIN TRAN

    INSERT  INTO dbo.LogonListDailyRollup

            ( LoginName ,

              HostName ,

              ApplicationName ,

              LoginDate ,

              LoginCount

            )

            SELECT  LoginName ,

                    HostName ,

                    ApplicationName ,

                    CONVERT(DATE, LoginDate) AS LoginDate ,

                    COUNT(*) AS LoginCount

            FROM    dbo.LogonList

            WHERE   LoginDate < CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE())

            GROUP BY LoginName ,

                    HostName ,

                    ApplicationName ,

                    CONVERT(DATE, LoginDate);

    DELETE  FROM dbo.LogonList

    WHERE   LoginDate < CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE());

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH

    SELECT  ERROR_MESSAGE()

    ROLLBACK TRAN

END CATCH

COMMIT TRAN

GO

--db context back to master for creating the login trigger

USE master 

go

CREATE TRIGGER LogLogons ON ALL SERVER

    WITH EXECUTE AS 'LogonLogging'

    FOR LOGON

AS

    BEGIN

        INSERT  INTO DBAdmin.dbo.LogonList

                ( LoginName ,

                  HostName ,

                  ApplicationName ,

                  LoginDate 

                )

                SELECT  ORIGINAL_LOGIN() ,

                        HOST_NAME() ,

                        APP_NAME() ,

                        GETDATE()

                WHERE   ORIGINAL_LOGIN() NOT LIKE N'NT SERVICE%'

    END ;

GO

Today you can register for $1,095 (that’s 50% off the full price). Tomorrow that price goes up. Get in now and save some bucks. The price only goes up by $100, but with you having the option of pre-purchasing the Summit DVD set for $125 when you register. That means by registering today you can get all the sessions delivered to you for only $25. Now THAT is a bargain.

Snow + Seattle = Bad News

HA/DR are critical items for all companies. HA in various degrees, but most certainly DR and the ability to provide some kind of business continuity model. Different companies, large and small, have different requirements around HA/DR. Some could easily remain down for a couple of days with no lingering effects, others cannot sustain downtime on their most critical systems of more than a couple of minutes. Based upon those requirements (and any budget constraints) a company could implement HA/DR using Failover Clustering, Mirroring, Log Shipping, SAN Replication, Peer-to-Peer Replication, VMotion or some other technology.

Where HA/DR often falls down

This is all good and well but what about the people that you need in order to get things up and running, the folks that you need in order to provide you with ongoing support in the event that a situation arises where you have to go to your DR site, or provide support for that critical system where a mirror has failed?

In the last 80 hours I have been called by the NOC at work stating that they have an issue. I don’t have power at home so my internet access is off. I don’t have sufficient power in my phone to tether it (don’t tell the wireless company I can do that) and it would take 4 hours sitting in the car to get sufficient power to allow me to do that. I do have a mobile broadband USB device, however I’m not getting coverage in my house right now from that carrier and I have been unable to get out of my road. In other words in the whole HA/DR side of things I’m a single point of failure. Luckily I have a colleague with power who I was able to point the NOC to in order to provide resolution to the issue.

My colleague and I live less than 5 miles apart, we are just luckily on different circuits and substations for the power company. If neither of us had been able to dial in then the problem would not have been resolved.

If you truly want to implement HA/DR you need to go further than just looking at your hardware infrastructure or the way that your software is setup. It means more than your DNS configuration and your Active Directory setup. There’s more to it than setting a Failover Partner in your application connection string. It’s about the people that you need to support these things!

Artificial limitations

I’ve been a DBA for about 12 years now. I’ve not been hands on with a server since doing datacenter implementation work about 5 years ago. Other than in very small shops it’s rare that a DBA touches a server, most don’t even have access to the datacenter in which their database servers reside. There has been a huge move towards setup in Colocation Datacenters (CoLo’s) over the last few years, meaning that more often than not the datacenter where you servers reside are probably not even in the same physical building that you are. There is also the current move to the Cloud initiative that’s gaining some traction. Given all of this information I ask you this:

Why are DBAs so often tied to a physical location for work?

This is a serious question. There are so few telecommuting options for DBAs out there. You can look on the job boards and see virtually none. There’s a lot of relocation opportunities if you want to move to another state, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. If you are going to geographically disperse your hardware due to HA/DR needs why would you not do that same for the teams that have to support it?

So many companies point blank refuse to even entertain the idea of telecommuters from another state (heck the vast majority won’t even contemplate allowing IT support staff to work from home a couple of days a week).

The same companies that happily outsource all development processes to an unknown entity in India or China refuse to entertain the idea of allowing Windows/Unix Admins or DBAs to telecommute.

I feel that it is somewhat ironic that the same people that expect you to come to the office and be tied to a physical location also have you be on call so that you can provide remote support when something goes wrong.

Moving beyond the office

Forcing IT support staff to come to a physical location 5 days a week makes little to no sense to me. I can understand the desire to have folks in the same physical location but as your organization grows it really needs to find a way to get past that mentality. There are various options such as LiveMeeting or GoToMeeting that can provide a telepresence in meetings for people that work remotely. Instant Messaging can be used to constantly keep people in touch. Services such as Yammer can be used to quickly and easily provide collaborative thought outside of meetings.

Looking at my current situation, if my colleague and I had both been without power we would have had no way to provide support. Our servers sit in a CoLo that we don’t have access to so even if we could have gotten there, we would have had no hands on way to work with the servers.

Now imagine we had a third person on the team that lived and worked in another state (or that the second person was living in another state and telecommuted in). Even with power down for me (or the entire state) we would still have someone available to provide support (unless by extremely unusual circumstances they were also down). With a remote DR site they could have effected whatever steps were necessary to bring that online and check that things were working ok.

Let’s look at this from another angle. I’m in the Pacific Time Zone and get to work usually 7:00-7:30am and leave 4:30-5:00pm. If we had someone working in the Eastern Time Zone and they worked the same hours we would have coverage (without emergencies handled by being on call) from 4am PST – 4:30pm PST. That’s an extra 3 hours of standard DBA coverage. Imagine how much more work could get done. How overnight problems could be identified and resolved earlier?

We live in a global society and the company that I work for does business internationally. Would it not make a lot more sense to provide a wider margin of coverage? Think about it, it would also improve the quality of life for anyone that had to be on call. For me the worst time to get called out is about 4am as I’ll never get back to sleep. If there was someone already in the office on the east coast I wouldn’t need to get called out. The same for them with evening plans. They could go out to dinner or a movie knowing that they wouldn’t have to worry about missing a call.

TL;DR

It’s the 21st century, there are many options to prevent the need for anyone to be physically tied to an office location (certainly amongst IT staff). In order to provide higher levels of support to companies they really need to embrace telecommuting options beyond providing emergency support.

Late Note: After 80 hours PSE were able to restore power to my neighborhood. Throughout the outage PSE did a fantastic job of handling things. Ultimately over 375,000 were without power at one time or another. PSE provided constant information wherever possible via their Twitter feed and website. They brought in crews from around the country to assist in the restoration efforts. All in all I think they handled things really well. I have no complaints with how they handled any of this. (I just wish I’d been closer to the top of the restore list)

The server in question is a SQL 2008 subscriber to several published tables on the staging OLTP SQL 2008 Instance (using push subscriptions). Sadly, not thinking of this ahead of time, we neglected to adjust the maximum distribution retention period for transactional replication (which sits at 72 hours). Suffice to say, the server came back online, we restarted the distribution agents we got the dreaded "subscription marked as inactive" error requiring us to have to reinitialize all of the subscriptions to that server.

"There goes my afternoon" thought I. Not being a fan of the replication monitor in 2008 I dreaded having to work with it to go through and reinitialize each and every publication for that subscriber, especially given that there are around 80 different articles. There must be a better way I thought...and lo, there is!

Books online talks about sp_reinitsubscription and passing parameters for the publication, article, subscriber, destination database, for schema change, publisher, ignore distributor failover and invalidate snapshot.

What BOL is not clear about it that you can pass in just a subscriber, that's it, nothing else.

exec sp_reinitsubscription @subscriber = '<sql instance>';

Running this reinitialized all of the publications within the current database for that one subscriber. Very quick, very easy. From there I just had to kickstart the snapshot agents and we were back in business (sp_start_job in this case ftw).

Ed Watson (blog|twitter)  asked the following question on #SQLHelp

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while so that I can get good ongoing trending information around table row counts.

There are several ways to accomplish this but PowerShell was the clear winner for me. I wanted the script to accomplish a couple of things

• Capture the SQL instance name, database name, table name (including schema) and row count for all tables in a database
• To grab the information for all the databases on a server (including system databases)
• To write the data to a SQL table
• Provide the option of dumping the data to the screen
• Allow me to execute it quickly and easily against multiple servers without providing interactive input

The script I’ve written does all this. The only bugs I’ve found are that the model and tempdb table information is not accessible, but this isn’t really an issue as model doesn’t get any use and tempdb is far too frequently updated to be of any use.

The Scripts

Firstly we need to create a couple of SQL tables to hold the results. These should be created on the SQL instance and database of your choosing. The script itself should be updated to reference the locations of these tables (ultimately it made more sense to do it this way rather than pass the information in as a parameter).

CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLTableRowCounts

    (

      SQLInstance NVARCHAR(128) ,

      DBName NVARCHAR(128) ,

      TableName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      TableRowCount BIGINT, 

      LoadDate DATE DEFAULT CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE())

    );

CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLTableRowCountsArchive

    (

      SQLInstance NVARCHAR(128) ,

      DBName NVARCHAR(128) ,

      TableName NVARCHAR(256) ,

      TableRowCount BIGINT,

      LoadDate DATE DEFAULT CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE())

    );    

There are no indexes on the tables currently. Depending upon your usage patterns a couple of different indexes could apply. I’ll let you decide what works best for you.

The PowerShell script is quite well documented and includes execution examples (you’ll want to run this on a machine where the SQL PS providers have been installed).

<#

.SYNOPSIS

   Script takes in a list of SQL Instances and iterates through the databases to retrieve a row count for each table. This is then loaded into a SQL database.

   Within the script the $StorageSQLServer and $StorageDatabase should be updated to reflect the relevant locations to load the data.

.DESCRIPTION

   Script takes in a list of SQL Instances and iterates through the databases to retrieve a row count for each table. This is then loaded into a SQL database.

   Within the script the $StorageSQLServer and $StorageDatabase should be updated to reflect the relevant locations to load the data.

   Requires bulk admin permissions on the SQL Server that you are loading the data to.

   Accepts pipelined inputs so that you can pass an array for working with multiple SQL Instances

.PARAMETER <$SQLInstance>

   This is the SQL Instance that you'll be working with

.PARAMETER <$verbose>

    Initially set to false. When set to true will also output the data to the console

.EXAMPLE

   Basic example: Get-TableRowCounts MySQLInstance

   Advanced: Get-Content C:\Temp\SQLInstances.txt | % { Get-TableRowCounts $_ }

#>

param

(

[string]$SQLInstance = "$(Read-Host 'SQL Server Instance [e.g. SQLPROD]')",

[switch]$verbose = $false

)

#Load the SQL snapins

get-pssnapin | where {$_.Name -match "SqlServerProviderSnapin100"} 

if (!$CheckSQLSnapins) 

{

    Add-PSSnapin SqlServerProviderSnapin100 

    Write-Host "SqlServerProviderSnapin100 Loaded"

}

#Set the following to the SQL instance and database that you want to load the data to

#You will need to have bulk insert permissions to be able to perform this action

$StorageSQLServer = "localhost"

$StorageDatabase = "SQLMonitor"

$BCPconnectionString = "Data Source=$StorageSQLServer;Integrated Security=true;Initial Catalog=$StorageDatabase;"

#Clean out the current data table if the data is not from today

Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance $StorageSQLServer -Database $StorageDatabase -Query "DELETE FROM dbo.SQLTableRowCounts WHERE LoadDate != CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE());"

function TableList ($SQLInstance, $DBName)

{

    #Handle default vs named instances

    if ($SQLInstance.Contains("`\"))

    {        $location = "SQLSERVER:\SQL\$SQLInstance\Databases\$DBName\Tables" }

    else

    {        $location = "SQLSERVER:\SQL\$SQLInstance\DEFAULT\Databases\$DBName\Tables" }

    <#

    Create data table to hold the results

    The datatable will live for the life of the function call to reduce memory overhead

    pulling from multiple servers

    #>

    $dataTable = New-Object system.Data.DataTable "Results"

    #Specify the column names for the data table

    $col1 = New-Object system.Data.DataColumn SQLInstance, ([string])

    $col2 = New-Object system.Data.DataColumn DatabaseName, ([string])

    $col3 = New-Object system.Data.DataColumn FullTableName,([string])

    $col4 = New-Object system.Data.DataColumn RowCounts,([int64])

    #Add the columns to the data table

    $dataTable.Columns.Add($col1)

    $dataTable.Columns.Add($col2)

    $dataTable.Columns.Add($col3)

    $dataTable.Columns.Add($col4)

    #Get our table list

    $TableList = dir $location -Force | select Owner, Name, RowCount

    #Iterate through the tables, load the rowcounts into the datatable

    foreach ($TableInfo in $TableList)

    {

        $TableOwner = $TableInfo.Owner 

        $TableName = $TableInfo.Name

        $TableRowCount = $TableInfo.RowCount

        $TableFullName = "$TableOwner.$TableName"

        #Provided there are rows in the table

        #Load the table/rowcounts into the datatable

        #This prevents errors due to nulls in model & tempdb

        if ($TableRowCount)

        {

            $row = $dataTable.NewRow()

            $row.SQLInstance = $SQLInstance

            $row.DatabaseName = $DBName

            $row.FullTableName = $TableFullName

            $row.RowCounts = $TableRowCount

            $dataTable.Rows.Add($row)

        }

    }

    if ($verbose) { Write-Output $dataTable }

    #Bulk load the data into SQL from the data table

    $bulkCopyRoles = new-object ("Data.SqlClient.SqlBulkCopy") $BCPconnectionString

    #Loads to the current table

    $bulkCopyRoles.DestinationTableName = "SQLTableRowCounts"

    $bulkCopyRoles.WriteToServer($dataTable)

    #Loads to the archive table

    $bulkCopyRoles.DestinationTableName = "SQLTableRowCountsArchive"

    $bulkCopyRoles.WriteToServer($dataTable)

    #Clean up after ourselves so we release memory used to hold the data table

    Remove-Variable dataTable

}

function DBList ($SQLInstance)

{

    #Handle default vs named instances

    if ($SQLInstance.Contains("`\"))

    {        $BaseLocation = "SQLSERVER:\SQL\$SQLInstance\Databases" }

    else

    {        $BaseLocation = "SQLSERVER:\SQL\$SQLInstance\DEFAULT\Databases" }

    $dblist = dir $BaseLocation -Force | select Name

    foreach ($db in $dblist)

    {

        $DBName = $db.Name

        TableList $SQLInstance $DBName 

    }

}

DBList $SQLInstance 

This script could easily be setup to execute daily to load the data into SQL so that you can perform quick and easy trends on table growth.

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

I could probably try and figure out lots of things that I mess around with to make myself more effective. For example adding aliases for my servers so that instead of having to go to “PRODSERVER17\FML27” I can just go to “FML27”.

Instead of that I thought I’d throw something up real quick that turned up as an issue the other day at work.

We have a bunch of scheduled Reporting Services reports that get emailed to users and files put out on shares. These schedules are actually run as SQL Server Agent jobs. We ran into an issue whereby a report failed over a weekend. We knew nothing about the failure, the first we knew was when the customer started complaining that the report was not available.

Knowing that the schedules are running in SQL Agent I looked for failed jobs. There were none. All the job does is submit the required report into the job queue and then say that it did it’s job. It does not actually monitor successful execution of the report itself. There doesn’t actually appear to be any quick and simple way of doing this. As such I wrote a process that goes out to the Reporting Services database on a daily basis, looks for reports that have failed and then sends me a report to let me know. It’s a good way to get ahead of the customer and find problems before they are reported.

Code below (in this code the default database ReportServer is used for the Reporting Services database)

/* 

Query grabs a list of the failed Reporting Services reports for the last 24 hours.

This list is then sent as an HTML table via email.

Data in email includes:

    Report Name

    Path To Report

    Username Executing Report

    Date/Time When Report Executed

    Parameters Used In Report Execution

*/

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @HTML VARCHAR(MAX)

DECLARE @HTML_Header VARCHAR(MAX)

DECLARE @HTML_Body VARCHAR(MAX)

DECLARE @HTML_Footer VARCHAR(MAX)

DECLARE @COUNT INT

--create the table to hold the dataset

DECLARE @Results TABLE

    (

      ID INT IDENTITY(1, 1) ,

      RSName NVARCHAR(850) ,

      RSPath NVARCHAR(850) ,

      UserName NVARCHAR(520) ,

      TimeStart DATETIME ,

      Parameters NVARCHAR(MAX)

    )

--Grab the data from the ReportServer database for failed reports

INSERT  INTO @Results

        ( RSName ,

          RSPath ,

          UserName ,

          TimeStart ,

          Parameters

        )

        SELECT  c.Name ,

                c.Path ,

                [UserName] ,

                [TimeStart] ,

                [Parameters]

        FROM    [ReportServer].[dbo].[ExecutionLogStorage] els

                INNER JOIN ReportServer.dbo.Catalog c ON els.ReportID = c.ItemID

        WHERE   status != 'rsSuccess'

                AND TimeStart > DATEADD(hh, -24, GETDATE())

        ORDER BY LogEntryId 

--create the email

SELECT  @count = MAX(ID)

FROM    @Results

IF @count <> 0 

    BEGIN

        SET @HTML_Header = '<html><header></header><body>

        <TABLE>

        <table border="1" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1"> 

        <TR colspan=2style="color: #A0522D; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11; font-weight:bold" align=Left>

        <td>Report Name</TD>

        <TD>Report Path</TD>

        <TD>Executed On</TD>

        <TD>Executed By</TD>

        <TD>Parameters</TD>

        </TR>

        '

        SET @HTML_FOoter = '</TABLE>

                <BR><BR>

                <FONT FACE="color: #A0522D; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12";></FONT></body></html>

        '

    END

ELSE 

    BEGIN

        SET @HTML_Header = 'No failed reports in the last 24 hours'

        SET @HTML_Footer = '</TABLE>'

    END

SELECT  @HTML_Body = ''

WHILE @count > 0 

    BEGIN

        SELECT  @HTML_Body = @html_body + '<TR style="font-size: 10">

                           <TD style="text-align: left;" >' + RSName + '</TD>

                           <TD style="text-align: LEFT;">&nbsp ' + RSPath

                + '</TD>

                           <TD>&nbsp ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR, timestart, 120)

                + '</TD>

                           <TD style="text-align: left;">&nbsp ' + Username

                + '</TD>

                           <TD style="text-align: left;">&nbsp '

                + ISNULL(Parameters, '') + '</TD>

</TR>'

        FROM    @results

        WHERE   ID = @count   

        SET @Count = @count - 1

    END    

SET @HTML = @HTML_Header + @HTML_Body + @HTML_FOoter

EXEC MSDB.DBO.SP_SEND_DBMAIL @RECIPIENTS = '<Your Email Address>',

    @SUBJECT = 'Failed RS Reports - Last 24 hours', @BODY = @HTML,

    @BODY_FORMAT = 'HTML'

--, @IMPORTANCE = 'HIGH'

GO

After a little trial and error I put together a script. The script doesn’t accept any pipelining, rather it will prompt you for the values (old school).

When asked enter the name of the local group (you don’t always want to add people to Administrators after all). Then the AD user or group name (include the domain for example PROD\SomeAccount). Finally a comma separated list of servers to add the account to. Yes, I could have done this with a text file or something like that, but this is to be used as a quick thing and it’s easier to just type a list of servers in rather than create a file every single time you run it.

Once those three things have been entered the script will go out, check to see if the AD user/group already exists in that server group. If it exists you’ll get a warning that it’s already there, otherwise it will add the user/group to the local server group. There’s also a quick check to see if the server is available, if not you’ll get an error for that particular machine, it will continue to work on the others.

Of course the account you execute this script as will have to have the relevant permissions on the remote servers to allow you to add the user/group.

<#

.SYNOPSIS

   Adds a domain user or group to a local Windows group on a local or remote server

.DESCRIPTION

   This script can be used in the event you need to add a domain user or group to a local Windows server group.

   It's real strength comes in being able to enter a comma delimited list of servers so that you can add the same domain user/group to multple machines quickly and easily.

   The user executing the process will require the rights on the remote machines to be able to add the accounts.

   Contains basic error handling to check if the server is reachable, if the group exists and if the user is already a member of the group.

.PARAMETER <paramName>

   No parameters, script file will ask for input

#>

$usrName = (Read-Host "Enter the domain account or group that you wish to add to the local server group (eg PROD\MyAccount)")

$grpName = (Read-Host "Enter the server group name that the user should be added to (eg Administrators)")

$srvList = (read-host "Enter a comma delimited list of servers (eg SrvA, SrvB)").split(",")

Write-Host ""

$Exists = 0 #Initialize the Exists variable which is used to see whether or not users should be added to groups

foreach ($srvName in $srvList)

    {

    $srvName = $srvName.Trim().ToUpper() #Gets rid of spaces

try

{

if([ADSI]::Exists("WinNT://$srvName/$grpName,group")) #Check to see if the group exists

    { 

        #Set the comparison string for the account to add

        $usrName = $usrName  -replace "\\", "/"

        $chkOutput = "WinNT://$usrName"

        #Write-Output "Checking for $chkOutput"

        $group = [ADSI]("WinNT://$srvName/$grpName,group") 

        $group.Members() | 

        % { 

            $AdPath = $_.GetType().InvokeMember("Adspath", 'GetProperty', $null, $_, $null) 

            #Write-Output $AdPath

            if ($AdPath -ilike $chkOutput) 

                {

                Write-Warning "User $usrName already a member of the $grpName group on $srvName"

                $Exists = 1 #This way we won't try to add an account twice

                }

        }        

        if ($Exists -eq 0)

        { 

            Write-Output "Account $usrName does not exist in the local $grpName group on $srvName. Adding now..." 

            $group.add("WinNT://$usrName,user") #Add the account to the local server group

            $Exists = 0 #Reset the Exists variable ready for the next server

        }

    }

else

{

    Write-Warning "The $grpName group does not exist on server $srvName."

    }

}

catch { Write-Error "Server $srvName was unreachable." } 

}