How to Pass Multi-Valued Parameter to SSRS Sub Reports

I'm working on a report that contains about 10 subreports. Some of the subreports need multi-valued parameter passed from the main report. After struggling with it for awhile I came across a good post that explains three different ways to do that. All three worked from me.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/thread/ae5ac615-1076-428d-9fcf-6c27e5fee1f0/

Create a Report of the Reports

After some digging, I found this post that talks about how to get report usage information:
http://p2p.wrox.com/content/articles/creating-report-server-usage-report-sql-server-reporting-services

SQL Server 2008 Email Notification Setup

I was trying to set up an email notification for a SQL Server agent job. I set up the Database Mail profile under Management, created operators under SQL server Agent, selected an operator under the notification section of a job. After the job is completed, guess what, there is no email. After diggin around I found this post(http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqltools/thread/839b5c27-9bc5-4467-a9d4-e78f9934a761). I tried restarting the agent serice and then realized that the mail profile was not enabled under SQL Server Agent Properties -> Alert System. After enabling that and restarting the agent service, it worked. The key here is to enable the mail profile first, then restart the agent service.

An Interesting Report Caching Issue

I was working on caching a report and encountered an issue. It simply didn’t work. All caching settings were tried. But it just doesn’t cache the damn report. I looked around on the Internet and no one seemed to have the same issue. One unique thing about this report is a big multi-valued parameter called Feature. The drop down has 150 – 200 entries depending on the selection of other parameters.

The next thing I did was looking into the [ExecutionLog2] view in the ReportServer database. I compared the parameters used in two different report runs. And I noticed that on the big list of features, one feature was converted to lower case (test feature) while the other report run has the same feature in regular cases (Test Feature). The data set that generates the feature list has the feature listed as Test Feature. And the lower case issue is on different feature everytime. I don’t know why SSRS converts it into all lower case. But because of that, it thinks these two report runs contain different parameter selections. Therefore it is not cached.

To fix that, I did a upper() on the query that generates the feature list and the query that generates the final report data. The report now takes a little longer to run. But the caching issue is fixed.

A good article I found when I troubleshoot the issue is at:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/rob/archive/2010/02/11/caching-ssrs-reports-for-performance.aspx

SSRS Report Caching

I came across a good article that talks about report caching.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/rob/archive/2010/02/11/caching-ssrs-reports-for-performance.aspx

TestIng from my mobile phone

Testing

User Permission for Creating Linked Servers

I created a stored proc that drops and creates linked servers. The following system stored procs are called in my this stored proc:
master.dbo.sp_dropserver
master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver
master.dbo.sp_addlinkedsrvlogin

It works fine in my dev environment. But when I ran it on the prod db server, the following errors came up:
Msg 15247, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_dropserver, Line 20
User does not have permission to perform this action.
Msg 15247, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_MSaddserver_internal, Line 29
User does not have permission to perform this action.
Msg 15247, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_addlinkedsrvlogin, Line 25
User does not have permission to perform this action.

After looking around, I found out that the account that runs the stored proc needs the "ALTER ANY LINKED SERVER", "ALTER ANY LOGIN" permission and the "dbcreator" server role. These were not setup on the SQL authentication account that runs the stored proc. So I did the following permission granting in addition to manually set the "dbcreator" role.

USE master;
GRANT ALTER ANY LINKED SERVER TO WarehouseAdmin;
GO

USE master;
GRANT ALTER ANY LOGIN TO WarehouseAdmin;
GO

Now it runs fine.