Friday, December 31, 2010

Cannot find object xxx or you dont have permissions - SP in SQL 2005

One of my colleague wrote a stored procedure in which he was just truncating a table. On calling that SP from a BO developed in .Net 4.0 we got a message as below

"Cannot find object \"xxx\" or you dont have permissions"

The fun part was when we started the SQL Profiler it showed us that it has ran the SP without any errors. There was no error in EVENTVWR too.

On trying multiple options, I ended up giving OWNER rights to NETWORKSERVICE (the login which our service was hosted with) and it worked properly.

Friday, September 24, 2010

TestPartner 6.0 (23 July 2007)

(I wrote this blog when I was with Conchango and I was assigned to evaluate various automation tools and prepare a comparison report. I wrote this blog at that time and thought to add it out in this blog too.)

TestPartner 6.0

TestPartner 6.0 is a regression testing tool. It is a product of Compuware Corporation.

In my course of evaluation of regression testing tools I evaluated Rational Robot 2007 and TestPartner. As I have worked earlier on Rational Robot 2003 in one of my projects in my previous company, I was pretty much confident on it, so I evaluated it and prepared few nice scripts which helped in smoke testing of a project. Then I switched over to TestPartner.

The best thing I found was it was self explanatory. First thing I came across was Visual Test. In the first 2 hours of evaluation I was able to parametize and add verification points without any hassles which is rare in any tool without any help from any document. If you click on any of the steps it highlights the control on which the particular action is taken. All the logic that helps us to enter various business rules to make automated testing easy and actually functional were just a wizard away. Select the steps you need to repeat, open the wizard, mention the condition of stopping the repetition and that’s it.

All the things can be done through Visual Tests but there can be cases where we require test scripting. The scripting is done in VBA. As a result unlike Rational Robot, (SQA Basic Scripting) TestPartner has IntelliSense. (Feels like a boon ) Now we are just a dot (.) away from what we require. This I reckon is the biggest advantage against Rational according to me.

Sometimes it is really necessary to make functions, procedures etc. All can be made in a Test Script and can be called from a Visual test as and when required. (And that is just a right click away)

Then I got a chance to attend a 2 day workshop on TestPartner in Bangalore arranged by Compuware. It was a great opportunity to uncover and discover all the hidden functionalities which TestPartner has.

In the workshop I met existing users of TestPartner 5.6. (This doesn’t have Visual Test) I got a chance to talk to them regarding the ease and use of TestPartner in actual projects. (So that we don’t feel like guinea pigs) And expectedly they were in favor of TestPartner. They were quite enthusiastic in telling me how TestPartner has made their life easy. They also were quite happy with the kind of support they receive in case they are stuck at some point in time. I am seriously concerned about the support part of any tool. As this is the major thing which is required once we buy the product. I was thinking hopefully they are speaking the truth. Ironically after coming back to Vadodara I was stuck at some place and I mailed Compuware guys to help me out with the problem. Believe me within 10 minutes I am receiving a call from Bangalore to troubleshoot my problem, which was helpful.

The tool has inbuilt version management system which reduces our cost of buying an external tool to manage and maintain test scripts.

I automated many of the functionalities of the project I was working on which reduced the smoke testing time almost by half. Initially we required 6 man days. After implementing the scripts it took only 2½ man days.

To conclude, the tool is very intuitive. Visual test is a major advantage of using this tool. Support is also very good. It is really easy to implement it in any project. So, looking forward to use TestPartner in future projects.

Click here for original blog

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The setup failed to read IIsMimeMap table. The error code is -2147023550.

I've been facing issues with installation of Reporting service 2005 and making it run but for the first time I faced an issue while uninstalling it. On trying to uninstall I got the following error
"The setup failed to read IIsMimeMap table. The error code is -2147023550"
Solution:
1. Stop IIS Admin service
2. Stop IIS
3. Uninstall Reporting service.
Result:
Successfully uninstalled Reporting service 2005

ASP .Net Service account appears blank

Its been time I got a chance to trouble shoot a Reporting Service Problem, and this time it was on Windows 7. Actually I faced this issue once before and I managed to skip trouble shooting that.
Reading the initial "Program incompatible message" on running the setup of SQL 2005 I came to know that its necessary to install SP3 for SQL 2005 to run on Windows 7. I downloaded it and installed successfully.
On opening (my favorite) Reporting service Configuration tool, I observed that the "ASP .Net Service Account" appeared blank and because of that I was not able to change the Application pool to ReportServer (which is created by default)
Reading few blogs I changed the Application Pool to Reportserver (from DefaultAppPool) using IIS-> Advanced Settings
But still the problem of the ASP .Net service account was lingering.
I ran the following command to get the service account appear in the configuration tool.
aspnet_regiis -ga "NT Authority\NetworkService"