Paul Randal

Paul S. Randal (Paul@SQLskills.com, twitter @PaulRandal) is a world-renowned speaker, author, and instructor at SQLskills.com; he is also the CEO. He worked on the SQL Server Storage Engine team at Microsoft from 1999 to 2007, writing DBCC CHECKDB/repair for SQL Server 2005 and with responsibility for the entire Core Storage Engine during SQL Server 2008 development. Paul is an expert on disaster recovery, high availability, SQL Server internals, and database operations, and is a regular presenter at conferences worldwide. He owns and runs the company with his wife, Kimberly L. Tripp, and in their spare time they like to seek out odd-shaped bottom dwellers at remote dive sites around the world!
  • Interests: Doing anything with my wife, Kimberly Tripp: Sailing Scuba diving World travel Hiking Naval history Model building

Blogs

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

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

Presenting with Visual Studio Code

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

Advice I Like: In 100 Years

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

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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...

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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