SQL Server 2008 R2 release dated

So the speculation was right. SQL Server 2008 R2 will be out in May this year. Check out the post from MS here. No surprises that PowerPivot and self-service BI is getting a lot of airtime.

Analysis Services processing failure - 'Class not registered"

Beware of migrating SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services databases from a server that had an upgrade from SQL 2005 to one that has a clean install of 2008 - with no previous 2005 install. What you'll find is that the connection string information in the upgraded database will still be using the 2005 SQL Native Client provider; SQLNCLI.1. This is fine on a box that has this provider of course - ie one with a previous 2005 install. However a clean 2008 install won't have this version and you'll get a not terribly informative 'Class not registered message' when you try and process it - as I found out.

The solution is very straightforward - change the connection string in the database's data source to use SQLNCLI10.1 instead of SQLNCLI.1.

More information can be found here

Visual Studio 2008 crash using Reporting Services 2008 charts

Frustrating day today - with a few techology niggles (see above). Anyway this means I can post about it in the hope that it saves someone else a lot of trouble. The major problem I had was with Visual Studio 2008 crashing without warning or error. The first occasion led to me losing work. On both occasions it happened after adding a standard line chart to a Reporting Services report. After checking the Event Log I found the following entry:

.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3603 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7225795E) (80131506)

Did some Googling around and discovered many people getting a similar (though not identical) error message. The answer is to download a hotfix here. So far this seems to have done the trick with no crashes. Note that this isn't included in Visual Studio SP1 or SQL Server 2008 SP1- so service packing won't help (it is in fact a .NET hotfix, from what I can tell) . I would strongly suggest applying the hotfix for anyone planning to do graph/chart work in Reporting Services 2008...