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External Article

Checking the Plan Cache Warnings for a SQL Server Database

How often do you check your query plans to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing them, it means that you're not getting all those hints about missing indexes, join predicates or statistics. Is the query optimiser trying to tell you about implicit conversions? Dennes shows how to view the warnings in plan cache for a particular database using SQL.

2015-03-02

7,649 reads

External Article

Cloud Storage Replication Is Not Backup

The options that you need to select when setting up an Azure Storage service account allow you to specify the durability and high-availability of your data, but they don't provide for data recovery to a point-in-time. In fact, it means that some of the bad things that can happen to data are more efficiently replicated to all copies. Backup is quite a separate issue.

2015-02-27

8,864 reads

External Article

Another Look at Tuning Big Data Queries

Most large organizations have implemented one or more big data applications. As more data accumulates internal users and analysts execute more reports and forecasts, which leads to additional queries and analysis, and more reporting. The cycle continues: data growth leads to better analysis, which generates more reporting. Eventually the big data application swells with so much data and querying that performance suffers.

2015-02-26

11,157 reads

External Article

The DRI Subject of References

A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain the data model. It does this through referential constraints. They aren't complex, but are powerful, especially with the means to attach DRI actions to them. Joe Celko explains all, and pines for the ANSI CREATE ASSERTION statement.

2015-02-25

9,100 reads

External Article

The Importance of Caching

Performance tuning and optimization definitely have their place in minimizing SQL Server Licensing costs – by helping keep CPU utilization low. But it’s important to remember that the fastest and most efficient query possible is the one that you never execute against your SQL Server. That might sound trite, but it’s at the heart of caching – which is key to helping organizations save significant money on SQL Server licensing costs while simultaneously enabling better application performance and increased scalability.

2015-02-23

8,605 reads

External Article

The Promise - and the Pitfalls - of In-Memory OLTP

When SQL Server 2014 was released, it included Hekaton, Microsoft’s much talked about memory-optimized engine that brings In-Memory OLTP into play. With memory-optimized tables 30 times faster than disk-based tables, higher performance is promised – but at what cost? Jonathan Watts looks at the features that have improved, and those that need careful consideration.

2015-02-20

10,562 reads

External Article

Application Containers For Cloud Computing

Containers promise to make applications more portable and efficient. The technology, originally based on Linux's cgroups, provides a way of running several applications as modular, platform-agnostic packages in isolation on the same server. Docker's open-source approach to containers has dominated the market, and Microsoft is producing its own equivalent Windows system. What next? Will Containers replace VMS? Robert Sheldon investigates.

2015-02-18

8,746 reads

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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