Resolving SSRS windows authentication issue, continuous pop up of user authentication dialog and the user never gets authenticated.

Recently there has been a issue where in a test environment, one of my colleagues was having a scaled out setup of SSRS. He had dedicated virtual servers for Database, SSRS and SharePoint (SSRS was installed in SharePoint Integrated mode). After the installation he could connect to the Report Server using the default url within the same server where SSRS was installed. However, from any of the other servers, Database and SharePoint, this was not possible, as when accesses the url, the user authentication dialog continuously pops up and it never gets authenticated even though the user name and the password was confirmed to be correct.

After hours of struggling, it turned out that the issue was with the authentication settings of SSRS in the Reporting Services Config file. The below link can be used as a guide to do this.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281253.aspx

SQL Server Data Tools - Resolving self-refereces (referencing local database objects with three part name) issue

I have been allocated to stream line the database solution management of one of the projects we had that consisted of several databases. The primary database was a Navision CRM database, and there was a Data Warehouse project consisted of several staging databases.

In some of the databases, there were database objects created such as views, that references tables from the same database using three part name,

[Current Database Name].[schema].[Local Table Name]

As the first step of the solution management, I had to create SSDT database projects by importing the schema of these databases. However I came across this issue, where you should resolve all the references to objects of different databases. Since three part names were used for local tables, SSDT treats them as external objects, and requires these references to be resolved. After reading a few articles, that explained the only work around was to remove Database Name from the table names used, which is the preferred option, I came across this workaround to resolve these self-references.

In general, to resolve external database references in SSDT database projects, we should add database reference to the project, and change the code to add SQLCMD variable in place of the database name of the three part name. SSDT provides a set of pre-defined SQLCMD variables, such as $(DatabaseName) that gives option to provide current database name.

My workaround was to replace database names of the self-references to $(DatabaseName), so that it would look like below,

[$(DatabaseName)].[schema].[Table Name]

This resolved the self-referencing issue. However, it is always a best practice to avoid three part names for local objects!