Adding/editing or Testing SSRS Datasources in Report Manager generates a permission error

A developer was trying to add a datasource and use “test connection” in the report manager web interface instead of BIDS which, incidentally worked.  When they tried to save or test the data source, an error occurred “The permissions granted to user “Domain\User” are insufficient for performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied)”  After much websearching and digging through verbose SSRS logs, SQL Traces, Windows Event logs, Process Monitor traces, etc.  I had just about given up hope and turned to twitter to vent about the error.  Luckily, Chris Testa-O’Neill , Doug Lane, and Tamera Clark came to my rescue and headed me down the right path of this being an SSRS catalog permission issue (Thanks again!)

Environment Details

SSRS 2008r2

Folder inheritance is broken and the developer account has Browser permissions on the root folder as well as Browser, Publisher and Report Builder permissions on the sub-folder.  There are no system level permissions for the account.

The Problem

In the SSRS error log I found the following messages which are only slightly more helpful (Highlighted for influence)

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: The permissions granted to user ‘Domain\User’ are insufficient for performing this operation. —> Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.AccessDeniedException: The permissions granted to user ’Domain\User’ are insufficient for performing this operation.
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.WebServer.ReportingService2010Impl.TestConnectForDataSourceDefinition(DataSourceDefinition DataSourceDefinition, String UserName, String Password, String& ConnectError)…

The command is failing on the “TestConnectForDataSourceDefinition” method.  The permissions needed are those required by this method.

The Fix

Near the bottom of the documentation for the TestConnectForDataSourceDefinition the permissions required are listed as “Execute report definition”

Granting this permission is accomplished by connecting to the SSRS server with SSMS and creating a new system role with just this permission

Then grant the new role “Execute Report Definitions” permission

Finally add the user account to the new system role, this is done in report manager under Site Settings ->Security -> New Role Assignment

]]> http://www.allenkinsel.com/archive/2013/01/adventures-in-ssrs/feed/ 0 http://www.allenkinsel.com/archive/2012/10/it-was-2-good-years/ http://www.allenkinsel.com/archive/2012/10/it-was-2-good-years/#comments Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:40:10 +0000 Allen Kinsel http://www.allenkinsel.com/?p=1185 The voters have spoken and I will not be returning to the PASS board as an elected director in 2013.  A week ago I wrote a post about campaigning being hard and in it I wrote something that I believe and keep coming back to.

I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life serving the PASS organization and want the opportunity to spend a few hundred thousand more in the same role over the next two years. However, if by chance the community wants to see someone else in my seat on the board I can live with that, there aren’t any bad choices.

As much time and energy as I’ve put into PASS over the years this outcome stung a bit personally but I’ve come to accept the reality of it.  Thanks to everyone who supported me in this election cycle, I was truly humbled to receive your support.

Congrats to JRJ, Sri and Wendy.  I’m sure yall will do a great job keeping the organization moving forward on the right track.

PASS HQ

PASS HQ consists of about 16 people who are permanent salaried staff and at times (summit) upwards of a dozen additional contractors.  The Community Evangelists (Karla Landrum and Niko Neugebauer) will be the most likely contact points for most community members however they are just the front lines. The other people within the HQ team are where much of the additional work happens that allows us to put on great events like the Summit.  These largely unsung heroes of the SQL community do the majority of the heavy lifting from day to day and in many ways should be recognized as critical members of our SQL Community even if most of them wouldn’t know a tempdb from a checkdb.

Relationships matter

Learning to work within the HQ structure is very important for Board members as HQ has such a huge impact on all things PASS that they can greatly contribute to helping make a board member’s priorities a reality or conversely they can contribute to that same board member’s priorities languishing.  I’m happy to say that in the years I’ve been volunteering with PASS, I have taken the time to build strong relationships across the organization that allow me to get things done effectively.  Building these relationships has not always been a cakewalk, in fact far from it, but adversity seems to have had a way of making the working relationship I have within PASS HQ better.  Knowing where to turn within HQ to get answers or to unstick a hung process has proven to be invaluable in my tenure as a volunteer with PASS and now even more so as a Board member.

Please consider voting for me. I’m running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference. Click here to read about why I’m running.

Self-Promotion

Im a typical DBA type who has never been a fan of self-promotion, Ill happily sit in a corner and give 100% to an effort without looking for any acknowledgement in return.  I believe in doing a good Job and letting the results speak for themselves.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’m quiet or a reserved introvert, I’m actually the opposite.  I’d go so far as to say that my fellow Board members might agree that it wouldn’t be an understatement to say I can be quite outspoken and opinionated especially when its related to things I’m passionate about, unfortunately for campaigning purposes those are things only the 13 other Board members have seen regularly.

Campaigning to win on my terms

Since deciding to run for another term on the PASS Board I’ve had many conversations with pillars of our community about how I could win another term while not letting my disdain for self-promotion control my ability to get elected.  I want to maintain my position on the board so that I can continue serving the entire community.  To do that I’ve chosen to highlight my prior record and future plans for the organization without leveraging some of the other more self-promotional/direct contact aspects of typical election campaigns.  This was an incredibly difficult decision to make because I really want to win… but not at the expense of my own personality.  As a wise person once told me: “it’s better to be yourself and loose than pretend and loose hope”

My plan has been simple, keep doing what I’ve been doing.  (The question is: is it working?  I suppose I’ll find out Oct 15th)

• Blogging – I’ve blogged about PASS since nearly the beginning of my blogging (post #2) So I’ve continued
• Forums – I’ve been active in the Election forums (have a question, please post it!)
• Twitter – I’m always open to chat about #sqlpass on twitter regardless of whether its elections season or not
• Phone/Instant message – I’ve had a few phone/IM conversations about my platform.  Want to chat? Just ask.  I’m always available
• References – I asked a few people who know of my work with PASS for letters of reference

* Andy Warren, Jeremiah Peschka and Tjay Belt  (pdf pg 5-7)

Continuing to Serve

I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life serving the PASS organization and want the opportunity to spend a few hundred thousand more in the same role over the next two years.  However, if by chance the community wants to see someone else in my seat on the board I can live with that, there aren’t any bad choices.  I will still continue to focus on the SQL community; it will just be in a different way than I am able to currently.

If you appreciate and expect this level of candor from the PASS Board, Please consider voting for me.  I’m running for the PASS Board of Directors, and I need your help to make a difference.  Click here to read about why I’m running.

As PASS Director of Chapters, I had my first set of meetings a few weeks ago where every Chapter Leader worldwide was invited and thought I’d write a quick post about it.

Getting up to speed in a new PASS portfolio and having something good to talk about takes time so this meeting took a lot longer to materialize than I’d originally hoped.  The primary delay was it took quite a while to get enough good content that I felt comfortable inviting 300+ chapter leaders to give an extra an hour of their lives to PASS.  Now that the initial break in time is handled and I know we’re making solid progress towards improving PASS’s support of Chapters (I’ll have stuff to talk about that matters) We’ve agreed to schedule these update meetings quarterly.  This is in addition to the update meetings we’ve already been having bi-monthly with Regional mentors and the Bi-Monthly(ish) Chapter update emails/blog posts Ive already been doing.

Global Organizations = Follow the sun = Hard

Trying to find a time (or 2) that accomidates 300 different people is extremely challenging, In the past we’ve held Regional Mentor meetings at 9AM CST and 9PM CST in an effort to allow as many RM’s as possible to participate.  We’ve had varrying degrees of success and quite a few requests to have a time that better fits those in the EMEA region.  So we decided to move the initial time of the Chapter leader meeting to 6AM CST leaving the 9PM CST meeting in place.  This seemed to work out OK but, being ready to present at 6AM local time was tougher than I expected, combine that with a PASS site that wasnt working properly and the first meeting went less than spectacularly.  In the future we’ll probably move the morning meeting back to 9AM CST and offer a third meeting option in the middle of the day that better supports those in EMEA.  The meetings are recorded and posted online for all to chapter leaders so theres always that option as well.  Im open to other ideas about timings of these meetings so If your a RM or a Chapter leader and have an opinion feel free to contact me to share it.

Chapter Leader Resources

Karla (Blog|Twitter) has been working incredibly hard to update the Chapter Leaders resources page.  She has made many updates and changes to this Chapter leader only page, one of the largest changes mentioned is related to the new process that book publishers are asking PASS Chapters to use.  Im optimistic that the new process will help Chapters get a better selection of books in a shorter amount of time.  Karla also added a new Chapter logo  as a resource on this page.

Chapter Tools Project

A good portion of time was spent going over the changes in tools that have been rolled out for chapters.

The aim of this project is for PASS to provide effective tools to minimize the marketing work Chapter Leaders have to perform and increase reliability of records all while creating a one-stop shop of resources to efficiently promote and run a PASS Chapter.

To date, weve completed updates to the chapter newsletter emailer, created a chapter dashboard and created an events framework for chapters to use in displaying their meetings.  The events framework is the latest update, it is currently used on the chapters portal, and although its currently a v1 release it handles many things chapter leaders let us know they wanted like Auto archiving of meeting details, Auto populating Speaker info, timezone display differences, uploads and more.  There are several other hooks planned in the future for this events framework but this should provide a good starting infrastructure as we build more on to it.

Community Meetings at the Summit

Also covered were the community meetings at the summit.  If you’re a PASS community leader one or more of these is likely for you!

VIRTUAL CHAPTER LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

8:00 am – 9:00 am

Led by Denise McInerney

SQLSATURDAY LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

9:30 am – 12: 30 pm

Led by Kendal Van Dyke

REGIONAL MENTORS

Tuesday, November 6

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Led by Allen Kinsel

CHAPTER LEADERS

Tuesday, November 6

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Led by Allen Kinsel and Regional Mentors

Of course you would!  Well… Ok maybe not all of you would but Im hoping some of you would!!  If this sounds like a dream job for you, Ive got some very exciting news!  PASS is growing support for local communities again and we’re looking to hire a second community evangelist to work along side Karla Landrum (Blog|Twitter) and the PASS HQ team.

More details about the job specifics are available on the PASS site.

Hurry now, Dont delay, this offer only availble to the first 5 respondents,<insert late night infomercial schpeel here>, etc!

RM Travel

Previously I wrote about getting a budget exception to provide funds for RM’s to attend PASS events and hopefully learn some lessons about how we can best implement a program like this.  With the end of PASS’s Fiscal year on June 30 we ended the RM travel program.  I believe we learned some very good lessons and provided some very valuable support for some PASS events.

Some basic statistics

11 RM’s were able to participate and they attended

• 9 Chapter meetings
• 6 SQL Saturdays

Overall I wish we would have had better participation (this is about 33% of RM’s) but, given the timelines we had because of the nature of the budget exception as well as the parameters we put on the allocations per RM for this trial this was about what I expected we’d have.  We got some great feedback from the RM’s on these trips and I was especially appreciative of the feedback from RM’s that wasn’t the kindest and was brutally honest.

Chapter Tools Redesign

Ill admit to finding it mildly ironic that for as long as I’ve been a member of PASS we’ve had what I’ve often chalked up as “Data” problems.  When building the blueprint for reworking the Chapter Tools my main goal was to provide great tools to better enable chapters to grow local communities & host great events.  My secondary hopes were that in creating these tools that many of these data problems would be resolved by the ability to have one version of the truth.

In some ways over the last 3 months I’ve been disappointed with the amount of “visible” work that has been available to chapter leaders in the tools.  But, since I’ve been having at least twice weekly meetings with PASS IT from the beginning I am confident that things are going as fast as they should be.  I think its worth going through some of the challenges weve run into thus far if for no other reason than to remind myself what happened later!

We’ve hit a couple of detours that I didn’t account for in my expectations for the tools.  PASS had several different DNN portals at several different versions.  This is the basic explanation for why some chapter sites werent in single sign on and had other assorted issues where some chapters had functionality that others didnt.  This Included one particularly interesting issue where some chapters had different lists of “members” because some members were in the chapters portal sign on and others were additionally in the main PASS sign on but the chapter leader couldn’t contact (or see) both lists!  With the varrying DNN modules in use on over 150+ chapter portals PASS hosts, to get this consolidated and upgraded was no small feat.  Today all of the groundwork has been completed and we now have a single DNN Portal with a single DNN version in use across all of the chapter sites.

We also had an outbreak of data issues (remember where I mentioned this earlier!) What we found was we had quite a lot of outdated data about chapters, including which ones are active and what their actual leader contact info is.  This problem is a product of growth over the years and not having a system like the one we’re building to house all of the relevant data… This problem has been handled in some ways but, is still ongoing and PASSHQ is working on identifying the problems so we can fix them once and for all.

We also made a decision to build some webservices infrastructure now vs building it later in the project in order to have that infrastructure upfront instead of waiting till later to build it and retrofitting things at that point.

In addition to all of this we also had a couple of false starts with the outside web designer and the design of the public facing sqlpass.org changes that the chapter tools will be feeding in to.  I’m optimistic that these have been resolved as we’re currently seeing good progress from that perspective

All in all these problems havent been huge but, they have impacted how long I expected it to take us to start making changes that would be visible to not only the chapter leaders but the PASS community at large

Chapter tools Beta

If you’re a chapter leader, today the beta of the chapter tools changes can be seen if you log into the PASS website and click on the “Chapter Dashboard” menu under chapters.  The basic idea has been to replace all of the current CMM module features and enhance them as we move them over to a dashboard type interface.  Today there is basic chapter profile editing, Chapter mailing list uploads/updates. As well as a new chapter bulk emailer to send messages to the entire list of your chapter members.  If you have any comments or questions about these changes feel free to contact me.

In a (near) future post Ill outline a list of expected features that I’ve been compiling for this tools project.

In this case the table held various account codes in a char(06) column.  These codes were things like ‘001’, ‘002’,’A’, ‘B’ etc

Each account code was for use in a different system.  so, on system X it was an integer and system Y the codes were character based, etc

This data was used to join many different tables.  Initially these joins were small and straightforward with predicates restricting the code table results to only include the proper data for the system being used.

pseudo code looks roughly like this

UPDATE DATA

SET DATADESC = CODE.MORE_DATADESC

FROM DATA

JOIN CODE

ON DATA.CODE_KEY = CODE.CODE_KEY

JOIN METADATA

ON META_KEY = CODE.CODE_KEY

AND DATESTAMP > = ’9999-12-31′

WHERE DATA IS NULL

AND CODE.DATATYPE = ‘ACCT’

This is the execution plan from a typical update of 150Million rows

Notice the Metadata table and Codes table are joined before the data table so the resulting codes data is only going to include the 16 rows of smallint data which passes the implicit convert to smallint

As the rowcounts increased and joins changed the implicit data type conversions continued to work until one day they didn’t.  Instead they started returning this error message

Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Conversion failed when converting the varchar value ‘B     ‘ to data type smallint”

After some digging it turns out the optimizer had started using a different plan where it joined the tables together in a different order.

Heres that execution plan of the same update

Notice the Metadata table join is reordered and happens after the codes table is joined to the data table.  When the data table is joined to the code table the error above occurs as character data in codes cant be converted to smallint during the join

To overcome this problem there are a couple of choices (admittedly there are more than a couple so this list isnt inclusive)

Best –> Change the source table to account for having different source systems account code types in different columns with the correct datatypes.  Benefits are straightforward, the BIG drawback is the extra work for system redesign

Better –> Change the queries to use an explicit conversion on the joined columns changing the datatype on the data table from smallint to char(06).  The benefit is the small amount of change needed, the drawback is the extra bytes involved per row joined

Good OK –> Add a query hint to force the join order. The benefit is the small amount of change needed, the drawback is in my mind we’re now forcing the optimizer to take a different path than it would if left to its own.  I try to avoid hints unless there arent other options and in this case there are.

Other things that could be considered as solutions include temp tables, CTE’s, etc. all of which were more change then we wanted to pursue testing.

Like most in the SQL community who are fortunate enough to attend the annual summit I am looking forward to next Sunday.  But, unlike most I am probably looking forward to this years summit for slightly different reasons. I’m definitely ready for the plethora of sessions, the great networking and all of the regular things everyone looks forward to (SQLKARAOKE!) but, when you are as heavily involved as I am in leading the Summit Program Committee, just getting it “started” is a huge relief.

For the last four years Ive looked forward to the Sunday before the Summit like ive looked forward to no other Sunday of the year.  However this year is going to be different!  This year will be my last year of leading the Summit “Program Committee”.  Its truly bittersweet for me as Ive really loved doing this but Its time for me to focus on doing other things for our great community.

I plan on handing the reigns of the summit over to _____ after the end of this years Summit.  I wish I knew who was taking over so I could tell you, but as it is no one has volunteered and PASS doesn’t exactly have a structure in place to allow for transnational hand off(more on this later).  I wish I could say it will be all Rainbows and Unicorns for the next person leading the program committee but, the reality is it is a lot of work.  The payoff is quite large though in knowing that you lead a group of 30ish volunteers to do a large portion of the work in making the summit a success but, even with a dedicated support staff (PASSHQ) its still a challenge.  After doing every job from the bottom to the top of this small piece of PASS I  feel like ive literally “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt”

I’d guess Ive spent at least 10 hours a week on average working on the Summit for the last several years and this year I added on regular PASS Board member tasks and am regularly exceeding those 10 hours a week, unfortunately, its just not sustainable for me any longer.  Im happy to spend the time for the community but, Its time for a new challenge and fortunately being on the PASS Board affords me all of the community challenges I could ever need (including figuring out to handle transition within PASS mentioned earlier). 

If you spot me at the Summit, feel free to stop over and introduce yourself, I promise not to try and convince you to volunteer to take my PASS job!

My favorite PASS memory isnt actually a single memory at all, its actually the conglomeration of all the SHARED experiences I have with all the hundreds(?) of people that I have gotten to know rather well over the years.  One of the most important things about our community of SQL professionals that I can never seem to put into words are those “Shared experiences”, they are what makes us unique.  Some first timers will listen to the conversations and think “what in the world is so funny” or “really, did that actually happen” or more likely, “what in the heck are they talking about” and I can see that there would be some intimidation factor with that but, the reality is you just have to jump in and start making those shared experiences of your own.  While some of my favorite shared experiences are from 2004-2006 that doesnt mean that I dont have some great ones from 2010 with people I had just met.  My point really is those experiences (which un/fortunately become memories) whether made at the Summit, a SQL Rally, SQL Saturday, or a local UG meeting are the things that actually tie us together as a group of professionals.  Sure, we all talk SQL and geek about it but, without the shared experience factor we’d all just be names behind posts on a Newsgroup/Forum which wouldnt be nearly as much fun!  

just choose one

If I had to list a single memory though it would be from 2004, where it all started for me.  You see I had just met Pat Wright, and Tom Larock and somehow they convinced me to attend the early morning (7AM If I recall) PASS volunteer session.  Im not an early morning person AT ALL so I definelty felt some peer pressure to go but, I can honestly say sitting in that session hosted by Wayne Snyder has probably changed my professional career as much or more than anything else.  Wayne is a very dynamic speaker and he had us all believing we could change the world, or at least the SQL portion of it.  I really miss those sessions, and wish we could find a way to ressurect them because this introvert would have never become involved with PASS had it not been for that 1 single session (and the encouragement of Tom and Pat) Thanks to the 3 of you for that!