Decision Support

EDW Troubleshooting Guide

This page provides troubleshooting assistance for the following activities:

Logging In

  • Make sure you have access to the EDW – see the Check My Authorizations page.
  • Whenever you’re prompted for your user name, make sure you’re entering ‘netid\yournetid’ without the quotes and replacing yournetid with your UW NetID.
  • If you’re trying to run queries directly against EDW data:
    1. Make sure to open your query tool (Microsoft Access, SQL Management Studio, etc) using your UWNetID credentials. For more information see Open the Tool Using UW NetID Credentials.
    2. If you are connecting via ODBC (needed to use Microsoft Access), that ODBC connection must be created using your UWNetID.  For more information see the Create an ODBC Connection page.

Running Reports

The two most common report-running issues we hear about are related to logging in and data availability.

Logging In

See the Logging In section above.

Data Availability

When running a report, you may encounter an error message that resembles the image below.error occurred during client rendering message

Cryptic? Yes. Helpful? Not really. But the bottom line is that a database needed by the report isn't available and one of two things is happening:

  • The database is being loaded with data
  • The database is unavailable due to maintenance or an unexpected outage

You can check for both situations on the Decision Support home page, as described below.


Database is Loading

If the database is loading, you’ll see the ‘Loading…’ message in the Last Loaded column of the Data Availability Summary. 

data availability summary
AlertsDatabase is Unavailable

If you don’t see a ‘Loading…’ message, the database is unavailable.  Check the Alerts section in the right column of the Decision Support home page to see if an outage message has been posted. The message will list the databases that are unavailable along with an estimated time they should be available again. If you don’t see a message there, please send an email to dss-support@uw.edu to let us know about the issue you’ve encountered.

Connecting To Data

If you’re having trouble connecting to EDW data and you’ve worked through the Connect to Data instruction page, try the steps below.

  1. Ensure you have been granted access to EDW data.

    Find out if you have access to the EDW at the Check My Authorizations page.

  2. Be sure to connect using the fully qualified address of the server to which you are connecting. Click here for a list of all EDW servers.

    For example:
    ucssqlc1db1.admin.washington.edu\ODS
  3. If that doesn't work, use the server's port number rather than the name.

    For example:
    ucssqlc1db1.admin.washington.edu,4358
    edwsqlc1db2.admin.washington.edu,2635
    FYI, port numbers are not the preferred method of connection because if the port changes, users’ connections break.  (Geek details:  port numbers have been needed by some users to connect to named instances residing on clustered servers).

  4. If that doesn't work, modify the RunAs command to remove “/netonly” from the string.  You may need to cycle through the above steps again.
  5. Check that the user’s machine is trusted by the UW CA Certificate. (The user's error message may refer to an SSL Security error). See https://www.washington.edu/itconnect/security/ca/