Monthly Archives: October 2010

What is the cost of cloudspamming?

Being of curious nature, I wanted to test if spam traffic would affect cloud services in a typical “pay as you go” scenario.

I ordered an introductory SQL Azure package from Microsoft with a pay as you go pricing plan.

image

By creating a plain, empty, SQL server instance with a random public access name I managed to get a monthly $10 cost in just 2 months without any advertising or mentions anywhere.

It will be very interesting to se how the cloud services will develop in the future in regards to this aspect.

I

Setting debug to true in web.config breaks Reporting Services in SharePoint

When using Reporting Services reports in SharePoint and at the same time changing the debug attribute to true in web.config the following error message might appear in a web browser alongside the Reporting Services reports not behaving properly:

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; InfoPath.3)
Timestamp: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:01:21 UTC

Message: Sys.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: panelsCreated[x]
Line: 129
Char: 12
Code: 0
URI: http://servername/ScriptResource.axd?d=somethingcomplicated…

Changing the following attribute in the correct web.config will remedy the problem, however the debugging opportunities will take a hit…

<compilation optimizeCompilations="true" batch="false" debug="false">

How to: Enable larger reports in Reporting Services

When deploying large reports to SharePoint or Reporting Services from BIDS (Visual Studio) something like the following message might appear:

Error    1    System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: There was an exception running the extensions specified in the config file. —> System.Web.HttpException: Maximum request length exceeded.    at System.Web.HttpRequest.GetEntireRawContent()    at System.Web.HttpRequest.get_InputStream()    at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapServerProtocol.Initialize()    — End of inner exception stack trace —    at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapServerProtocol.Initialize()    at System.Web.Services.Protocols.ServerProtocol.SetContext(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response)    at System.Web.Services.Protocols.ServerProtocolFactory.Create(Type type, HttpContext context, HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response, Boolean& abortProcessing)        0    0

This happens when the report is bigger than the maxRequestLength specified in the Reporting Services web.config file. The default is 4 MB so if the Report is bigger than that it will fail to deploy. it will frequently happen if the report contains map reports using embedded esri shape file data…

The solution, apart from making the report smaller, is to increase the maxRequestLength attribute of the httpRuntime Element in the web.config file of the Reporting Services instance. This file might be found in a directory like this for SQL Server 2008 r2: C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSRS10_50.MSSQLSERVERReporting ServicesReportServer

Change the element to the following:

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="9000" maxRequestLength = "16384" />

where the 16384 equals 16 MB max sixe for the reports. Change the value to suit your report size needs…

 

more information about the element in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641.aspx

 

Updated 2012-12-08: The above link is outdated. Here are some alternative resources:

Report and Snapshot Size Limits (SQL Server 2008)

 Modify Reporting Services configuration files [AX 2012]