1. June 29, 2009 – power failures at a data center caused an outage
2. July 7, 2009 – more power failures at a data center caused an outage
3. November 3, 2009 – Rackspace’s Cloud Sites and Slicehost went down due to power problems
4. December 18, 2009 – Unknown as of this writing (it only happened three minutes ago!)

This isn’t an isolated LearnItFirst.com issue; it affects tons of people (TechCrunch is offline now too).

Looks like I was first in the twitterscape to break “the story” – lucky me! I beat @yrrenus by at least two full seconds :)

Within ten minutes, there were more than 100 tweets about Rackspace being down! I frigging love Twitter!

Notice that I've saved a search at the bottom and called it "High imps & low CTR". The problem is there appears to be no way to re-open this saved search later! I was flummoxed and so I went to the Adwords Editor support site and found this:

Your saved search will appear in the View menu under Saved custom views. At any time in the future, you can select this search name to view items in your account that match the criteria you specified. AdWords Editor stores up to eight searches.

Where the hell is the "View menu" in 7.5.2? I couldn't find it. It isn't next to the "other" menus: File, Edit, Account, Data, Tools and Help. So then I started searching Google for various keyword combinations to see if someone had posted about this same problem (they haven't). You know what I learned? If you want to see Google fail at search results, search for Google Adwords Editor saved search. There are probably two results in the over 44,000 results that are helpful and there are many pure spam results.

I spent 15 minutes trying to and, whilst searching in the editor, I saw a link to send feedback:

Fine - will do! So I fired off an email of a "question" type with a subject line of "Where are my saved searches?" and posted a bit about this problem and whether or not I was just not seeing it; basically I was asking how to find my saved searches.

Google Fails So Hard at Customer Service

Within two minutes I received a reply. I suspected it was ye olde "Thanks for writing - we'll get back to you soon!" but I was wrong: Google had answered me! Here was their reply:

Hello,

Thank you for writing in about editing your ad.

You can edit, pause, delete, or resume one ad at a time, or you can change many ads at once. Just be aware that changing the actual ad (such as editing text or uploading a new image) is the same as deleting the original ad and creating a new one, so after editing the ad, its statistics will be reset to zero. The same is true when you move an ad to another ad group.

To change one or more ads, please follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.

2. On your "Campaigns" tab, select the "Ads" tab.

3. Choose one of the options below to edit your ads.

Option 1. Change one ad (inline editing).

To change an ad's status between enabled and paused, click the status icon (such as the green dot or the pause symbol) next to the ad. To editan ad, click the text of your ad or the pencil icon next to the ad. Enter your changes, then click "Save." Whenever you edit and save your ad, it will automatically be resubmitted to us for review.

Option 2: Change multiple ads (bulk editing).

Check the boxes next to the ads you want to update. At the top of the ads table, you'll see a set of buttons and drop-down menus. Use the "Change status" menu to pause, delete, or resume the selected ads. Use the "More actions" menu to perform other tasks, such as copying ads to another ad group.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

What? No, that's not what I asked you. And worse, there is no, "Does this answer your question?" Hell - GoDaddy.com is atrocious but their customer support is miles above Google's.

Anyway, this is just a rant. Booooooooo, Google.

I finally found it

In case you are trying to find where your custom views/saved searches are, the View menu is staring you right in the face:

I feel silly now for not seeing it but, while in the documentation when I read "the View menu", I suspected it would be a menu item next to File, Edit, Account, etc. Doh! I have no excuse for my blindness.

Of course these look familiar – you see this all too often in SSIS. In particular, these errors are a Truncation warning and a data conversion error respectively. In the Designer (the name of the window in which we drag/drop our SSIS tasks and Data Flow components), we only get a weeeeeeee bit of information about the error. There are a few problems with troubleshooting based on this scant bit of info – let’s take a look at the data conversion error as an example.

The data conversion error’s text – the text that we can see in the Designer – says, “The column "EmployeeId" can't be inserted because the conversion between types DT_R8 and DT_I4 is no…”. Hmmmm – okay: from this tiny bit we can tell that there is a problem with the “EmployeeId” column and we can see that the source/destination data types are very different: the source is float (“DT_R8”) whereas the destination column is an integer (“DT_I4”). Makes sense – we don’t want to lose decimal places so, “Thanks for the error, SSIS!”

But is the EmployeeId column the only error or are other columns also experiencing type conversion errors? We can’t tell from the little error message we can see. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to see (a) the full error message (notice how the little ellipsis implies there is more but there is no obvious way to view the rest of the error), and (b) there is no way to determine if there are other columns experiencing similar errors.

The Fix

The error information can easily be seen with the Error List window:

When you view the Error List, you will see the full errors and in a “One error per entry” format – like this:

We can quickly see that there are two errors and four warnings:

If you click the tabs, you can isolate one or the other – you can just view the errors or just view the warnings.

I hope this makes it easier for you to troubleshoot SSIS errors!

P.S. – If you like this, you might also like my SSIS 2005 course over at http://www.learnitfirst.com/