Month: Jul 2020

Uninstall SQL Server Reporting Services 2019

First and foremost, remove and decommission unused / idle services without waiting! They consume resources such as storage, computing power, url reservations et cetera. Nothing is free.

I wouldn’t write a blog post about removing SSRS in normal conditions. However, SQL Server Reporting Services is a separate service now, starting from SQL 2017. That means few things:

  • It is not in SQL Server Installation Media anymore (Like SSMS)
  • It is a separate service now under Services
  • Hence, SSRS is an individual item on “Control Panel – Programs and Feature”

Before SQL 2017, we used to remove components like SSRS, SSIS and SSAS by clicking Microsoft SQL Server 20XX (Version bit) item but now as described above, you need to find and choose “Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services”, then click “Uninstall/Change”. The rest is Microsoft’s new interface and just one click.

SQL Server XML Conversion Error: “Conversion of one or more characters from XML to target collation impossible”

A quick and short post this time regarding a sql server error being thrown when you try to convert xml characters. XML column has an unicode character that can not be converted into ASCII, thus our engine is not happy about it.

Let’s say you have a “Table1” which stores a “XMLColumn” and you’d like to query on that column with LIKE operator. Hence, you convert it to varchar data type first.

SELECT XMLColumn FROM Table1
WHERE Convert(varchar(max), XMLColumn) IS LIKE %ARollingStone%

Then, you’ll get below error:

Msg 6355, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Conversion of one or more characters from XML to target collation impossible

To fix this, you need to simply change varchar to nvarchar, that’s it.

SELECT XMLColumn FROM Table1
WHERE Convert(nvarchar(max), XMLColumn) IS LIKE %ARollingStone%