Steve Jones

My background is I have been working with computers since I was about 12. My first "career" job in this industry was with network administration where I became the local DBA by default. I have also spent lots of time administering Netware and NT networks, developing software, managing smaller IT groups, making lots of coffee, ordering pizza for late nights, etc., etc.

I currently am the editor of SQL Server Central and an advocate/architect at Redgate Software. I am also the President of SQL Saturday, maintain the T-SQL Tuesday monthly party, and remember our colleagues at sqlmemorial.org.

You can find out more about me on my blog (www.voiceofthedba.com) or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/way0utwest)
  • Interests: yoga, reading, biking, snowboarding, volleyball

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Unstructured Data

I remember when Windows 3.1 started to gain widespread deployment in businesses. With all it's WYSIWYG features and multiple applications running at the same time, many people felt we'd get to a paperless office. Over a decade later I rarely see an office that doesn't have a copy machine and at least one printer. We've gotten better at shuffling bits, but we haven't gotten rid of paper.

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2007-11-01

136 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Mining or Profiling

The more data you have, the better you should be able to predict something. Or at least that's one of the things that I learned while studying economics. If we could actually gather enough data about someone or some system, we could determine what the most likely outputs of the system will be. In the […]

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2007-10-29

87 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

What's Fair

If you read my recent editorial called Get Some Help, you realize that I didn't get any World Series tickets from the sale on the Colorado Rockie's web site. Not to berate the subject, but some friends and I had an interesting debate on how the situation was handled and what could be done differently.

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2007-10-26

62 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Mini-Me

Will the next version of Windows be a "Mini-Me" version of Vista? Who knows, and it's too early to tell, but apparently there's a mini-kernel version of Windows 7, the one after Vista, which fits into 25MB on disk. That's a touch lower than the 4GB that Vista takes up. Granted it's not a full […]

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2007-10-25

143 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Get Some Help

The vast majority of us never work on high volume systems. And I mean high volume systems, like backing a web server that gets millions of hits in a few minutes, which might result in tens of millions of database queries in the same amount of time.

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2007-10-24

320 reads

Blogs

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Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost

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Forums

SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About

By Terry Jago

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How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake

By Chandan Shukla

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Cognitive Coverage

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Getting the Average

I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.

salesperson commission
Brian       12
Brian       16
Andy        7
Andy        14
Andy        21
Steve       20
Steve       NULL
All the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
     , AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
 FROM commission
 GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve?

See possible answers