I was editing some pre-existing SQL Server Agent jobs the other day, adding some interconnectivity and changing steps around as I’ve done hundreds of times before.  These job steps are used to execute SSIS packages (SQL Server Integration Services) on the server and have been running for months (years?) without fail.  However, after I made my changes they started failing on the steps I had edited, throwing the bizarre error:

Option "/CALLERINFO" is not valid.  The command line parameters are invalid.

I recently found myself with a situation in SQL Server where I had a string consisting of a series of values (constructed using the CLR function for concatenating values that I wrote about last week) that I needed to reverse.  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as using SQL Server’s built-in REVERSE function.  That actually reverses each individual character in a string, rather than switching the order of words.

I’ve had my fair share of issues with my broadband connection since signing up with O2 (provided by Be There) 3 years ago. Fortunately, it’s improved a great deal over that time and is now extremely stable. The biggest problem I had was playing online via Xbox LIVE, especially getting my Network Address Translation (NAT) settings right on the supplied O2 Wireless Box II (essentially a rebranded Thomson-Alcatel TG585v7).

One of the good things about SQL Server (as with most other Microsoft products) is that there are often multiple ways to achieve a single result.  One such example is the concatenation of cell values from multiple rows into a single, delimited string.

For those out there who like to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate the Yahoo index and mange their sites, the day you’ve been dreading has arrived. Yahoo have announced the final closure date for the service (after announcing earlier in the year that it would close “sometime this year”) and that day is tomorrow, Monday 21st November.  For managing your own sites, there’s always Bing or Google Webmaster tools but this obviously doesn’t give you the access to other sites on the web.  There are other services out there, like Majestic SEO or SEOmoz but you’re going to have to pay for these.

In my free time lately I’ve been getting into the superb online multi-player in EA and DICE’s Call of Duty baiter, Battlefield 3 on Xbox 360.  For anyone who’s not tried the series, it’s a large scale multi-player military shooter with wide open maps and a variety of land, sea and air vehicles with which to play.  While it’s enormous fun, especially if your fellow players work as a team it’s unfortunately riddled with game-breaking bugs.  Some players seem worse affected than others and the issues seem to be spread across all three of the game’s platforms; Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

If you’re a reasonably social media-savvy person, you’ll no doubt have heard of (and perhaps used) Klout, an innovative online service for measuring online influence via social media.  Klout’s unique selling point is their own calculation of influence, the Klout Score.  While it’s not exactly new to the social sphere, having been on the go in some shape or form since 2008, Klout have recently been engaging in a substantial push to increase the scope of their offering by adding many more social networks and features.

I recently encountered a scenario where I wanted to display my report content in the form of a multi-column list. In essence, I was looking to create the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) equivalent of an ASP.NET Repeater, to render my report content both horizontally and vertically (in this case a dynamically repeated SubReport) a number of times dictated by my source dataset. I spent a little bit of time investigating some more complicated possibilities such as building a matrix of row and column groupings when the solution finally hit me. It is simply brilliant in its simplicity. Here’s how to do it.