My name is James Anderson and I am a SQL Server production DBA in the south of the UK. I have been working with databases since 2008. The first RDBMS I worked on was Paradox and I never want to see it again. I quickly moved to using T-SQL in SQL Server 2005. I have worked on every version of the product since. I enjoy query tuning and server optimisation. I detest transactional replication.

All authors

All authors

Blogs

A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth

By

You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...

Presenting with Visual Studio Code

By

A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...

Advice I Like: In 100 Years

By

In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

By inHouseDBA

Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...

connections vs apis

By stan

hi , i hear more and more that we have too many connections to...

is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs

By stan

Hi, i'm running vs2022.   I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...

Visit the forum

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