Reading list for the week – 26/09/11

Posted on September 26, 2011 by PradeepAdiga

This week I have quite a few very good articles listed in the Reading list for the week. The list begins with a post from the master himself, Paul Randal (b | t). In How does DBCC CHECKDB WITH ESTIMATEONLY work? post Paul explains how DBCC CHECKDB consumes space on tempdb and how one can use WITH ESTIMATEONLY to forecast the space requirement on tempdb for CHECKDB to complete.

Paul White (b | t) explains in detail which statistics are used to compile an Execution Plan in his post How to Find the Statistics Used to Compile an Execution Plan.

We all come across bugs in SQL Server. SQL community is the major contributor in reporting these bugs. Aaron Bertrand (b |t), who is an expert in filing the bugs related to SQL Server talks about the art of filing bugs in his post Want your bug fixed? File a good bug!

Laerte Poltronieri Junior explains how to store the Event Log entries in SQL Server by using Powershell, in his post Storing Windows Event Viewer Output in a SQL Server table with PowerShell

Cumulative update package 16 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 was released recently. More details about it here.

Happy learning!

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MSP Error: 29528 The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting reporting service exclusion path

Posted on September 20, 2011 by PradeepAdiga

Yet another post related to SQL Server patching, eh? Yes. I feel I have a lot more lined up because in the next couple of months we will be applying Service Packs on close to 200 SQL Server instances.

Last Sunday, Service Pack 4 was supposed to be applied on one of the SQL Server 2005 instance. All components of SQL Server were successfully patched except for SQL Server Reporting Services. The following error was logged in the Summary.txt file.

Status : Failure
Log File : C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Hotfix\RS9_Hotfix_KB2463332_sqlrun_rs.msp.log
Error Number : 29528
Error Description : MSP Error: 29528 The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting reporting service and share point exclusion path. The error is: Fatal error during installation.

The RS9_Hotfix_KB2463332_sqlrun_rs.msp.log file was 6MB in size and quickly scrolling through it did not provide much useful information. The Event Logs also did not have much information apart from the message indicating the Service Pack installation failure. Instead of scrolling through the log file which had 61037 lines (yes, you read it right), I took a step back and analyzed the prerequisites.

Since it is SQL Server 2005, the Reporting Service depends on Internet Information Services (IIS). The Reporting Service Configuration Manager makes use of IIS to create the Virtual Directories along with the database hosted in SQL Server, to render the reports. My plan was to check IIS for any issues and then move on to look at the Reporting Services configuration.

Hence I opened up the Service Manager (services.msc). Surprise! Here is what I saw.

The IIS Admin Service was disabled. Obviously the Service Pack installer was unable to fetch the settings on IIS. Immediately, I enabled the IIS Admin Service and launched the Service Pack installer again and this is what I got.

Nice! Mission accomplished.

Why was the IIS service disabled? It was a test box. Do I need to say anything more?

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