Hi Chris, thanks for the feedback.

Chris Harshman (12/20/2016)

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There's certainly a lot to digest in that ER diagram. I have a couple of questions offhand, but they may just...

The points you've listed are good ideas.

I can't talk from experience regarding how best to use stored procedures for report queries, I can talk from the other side though. We...

sp_readerrorlogs doesn't show any issues except those from the times I've ran DBCC CHECKDB and a number of non-descript service exception stack dumps from a vendor-managed system which I will...

There's a PASS group on Disaster Recovery - this is amazing! Thanks for the pointer 🙂

I should have noted that this database isn't business critical. I definitely would look into hiring Gail if this were, thanks TheSQLGuru.

Is there anything more I could do towards fixing...

The most efficient way I've found, when you know the column maximum length (and it's not thousands, and it isn't going to change[!]) is simply hard-coding a case statement for...

To add to drew's answer, if your issue is with that JOIN within a JOIN condition, I would think of it as building a result-set from the inner JOIN, and...

Neat - I didn't notice there's file attachment on the forums. See attached - I've included an XML data source in the report with a small sample of data and...

It should be possible to sum unique values using custom code.

I've uploaded an example report file here. Here's how to recreate:

Add a table with a detail row and a table...

Good strategy using RowNumber to filter unique values. Try the below SSRS expression (SUM the field only if the RowNumber field has a 1):

=SUM(iif(Fields!rownum.Value = 1, Fields!ProductCost.Value, Nothing)

There doesn't appear to be a nice solution to case sensitivity in SSRS Repalce. COLLATE is a SQL clause - it's not accessible in an SSRS expression.

I suggest doing...

You could re-write that as one UPDATE with a CASE statement.

CREATE PROCEDURE Test

(

@col1 INT,

@col2 INT

)

AS

UPDATE TestTable

SET col3 =

...

Have you tried CAST(STUDENT_CRS_HIST.JOB_TIME AS DATE)?

The below query would give you a list of distinct dates.

SELECT DISTINCT CAST(STUDENT_CRS_HIST.JOB_TIME AS DATE) AS JOB_DATE

FROM STUDENT_CRS_HIST

For an alternative, check out the FORMAT...

Execute your stored procedure from SQL Server Management Studio with a statement like this:

exec [sp_Addoffices]

@Office_Name = 'The Batch',

@Office_Address = '1 Test...

I would have no problem restoring the vendor's database. Unless you have reason not to trust the specific vendor, and even then I'd probably ask for the backup to review...