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Schema Design Basics for Power BI

You have a Power BI project that generates real-time reports for an inventory management system that uses SQL Server. You are aware that Power BI performance is heavily influenced by how your data is structured in SQL Server but don’t have a clear understanding of how to optimize your SQL data structure for Power BI. In this article, we look at different ways to structure the data and tables to help improve Power BI query performance.

2025-10-13

External Article

Natural Language Query for SQL Server

Data is usually the most important asset in organizations, but only SQL developers can frequently access that data. Technical teams often write queries for non-technical users. This restricts agility, slows decision-making, and creates a bottleneck in data accessibility. One possible remedy is natural language processing (NLP), which enables users to ask questions in simple English and receive answers without knowing any code. Still, the majority of NLP-to-SQL solutions are cloud-based, which raises issues with cost and privacy.

2025-10-03

External Article

Unlocking the Power of FULL OUTER JOIN in SQL: Performance, Use Cases & Examples

The JOIN statement is one of the most common operations SQL developers perform. Yet in a world ruled by Inner and Left Joins, the poor Full Outer Join is like Cinderella before the ball – allowed out on only the rarest of occasions. In an (unscientific) survey I once performed of SQL developers at one Fortune 100 firm, half of the developers had never used a Full Outer Join in production code, and the rest had used it in a tiny handful of occasions.

2025-10-01

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Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

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Question of the Day

Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:

SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:
Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.
What is wrong?

See possible answers