Reporting services 2008 does not need IIS

Here is how it handles without IIS

http://blogs.msdn.com/bwelcker/archive/2007/12/04/everybody-why-leave-iis.aspx

SSIS Configurations

There is a significant change in how SSIS applies configurations in SQL Server 2008. The configurations are applied twice – once before applying the command line options and once after applying the command line options. So it overwrites the value specified on the command line.

This is a nice improvement since you can set up a package with SQL Server Configurations and change the connection string for SQL Server configuration.

Check this link for more information

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671625.aspx

Truncate Mirrored Database Log File

If you are running asynchronous database mirroring, then there could be a backlog of transaction log records that have not been sent from the principal to the mirror (called the database mirroring SEND queue). The transaction log records cannot be freed until they have been successfully sent. With a high rate of transaction log record generation and limited bandwidth on the network (or other hardware issues), the backlog can grow quite large and cause the transaction log to grow.

On the mirrored database, you cannot backup the log file with TRUNCATE_ONLY. Here the steps to shrink the log file for a database participating in mirroring

1. Backup the log file to a location

BACKUP Log YourDatabaseName TO DISK = 'D:\BACKUP\DBNAME_20090201.TRN'

2. Check if there is enough free space on perform the shrink operation

SELECT name ,size/128.0 - CAST(FILEPROPERTY(name, 'SpaceUsed') AS int)/128.0 AS AvailableSpaceInMB

FROM sys.database_files;

DBCC SQLPERF(LOGSPACE);

If there is no sufficient free space then the shrink operation cannot reduce file size.

3. Check if all the transactions are written into the disk

DBCC LOGINFO('YourDatabaseName')

The status of the last transaction should be 0. If not, then backup the transaction log once again.

4. Shrink the log file

DBCC SHRINKFILE(logfilename , target_size)

If the transaction lof file does not shrink after performing the above steps then backup the log file again to make more of the virtual log files inactive.

Also check the column LOG_REUSE_WAIT_DESC in the sys.databases catalog view to check if the reuse of the transaction log space is waiting on anything.

Check this link to find the factors that can delay log truncation

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345414(SQL.90).aspx

Connecting to Remote SSIS Server

If you get the “Access is denied” error while connecting to remote SSIS server, you may have to perform the steps outlined in the following link

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337083.aspx

Additional steps to perform which are not in the MSDN page

1. Add the user to the Distributed COM Users group on the server
2. Restart the SSIS service after making changes
3. At the minimum, add the user to the MSDB db_dtsltduser role to edit their own packages. Check this link for more permissions on the msdb database

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141053.aspx

SSIS 2008 New Features

This is a neat article which outlines the new SSIS features in SQL Server 2008

http://www.simple-talk.com/content/print.aspx?article=541

SQL Server 2008 Top 10 T-SQL features

Here is the list of new T-SQL features that I really like in SQL Server2K8.

1.Intellisense in SQL Server Management Studio – It is easy to learn the database schema and the objects on the fly with this feature

2.Inline Variable Assignment – Inline variable initialization is possible now

DECLARE @i INT = 2

SELECT @i AS VALUE

GO

3.Compound Assigment of variables

DECLARE @i INT = 3

SELECT @i += 1

SELECT @i

GO

4.Filtered Indexes - Filtered index is used to index a portion of rows in a table. It is an optimized nonclustered index which can improve query performance and reduce index cost.

5.Table Valued Parameters – These are new parameter types in SQL Server 2008 which allows to send mulitple rows of data to a T-SQL statement or routine.


6.Row Constructors – These allow to insert multiple rows with a single INSERT statement

7.Merge statement – It is a new DML statement which allows to perform Insert/Update/Delete operations on one table using single scan.

8.New datatypes – SQL 2K8 has various new datatypes like spatial datatypes, datetime datatypes (DATE, TIME, DATETIME2) and Hierarchy datatypes. Of all FileStream Data type interests me the most (we don’t have to be creative inventing ways to store unstructured data anymore).

9.Grouping sets – This clause allows us to easily specify combinations of groupings to see different levels of aggregated data.

10.Sparse Columns – Columns created with this clause takes less space than the regular columns when it contains zero or null. These also allow us to create tables with more than 1024 columns.

SQL Server 2008 – What happened to Surface Area Configuration tool?

Have you ever wondered what happened to the Surface Area Configuration (SAC) tool in SQL Server 2008? It has been removed in SQL Server 2008. SQL Configuration Manager or SSMS can be used to configure settings, options and component features.

Here is an article from BOL

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281850.aspx