Columnstore indexes are a powerful tool for storing analytic data directly in SQL Server. This feature has improved in every version of SQL Server since their inception over ten years ago, and SQL Server 2025 is no exception!
2025-08-25
While Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are powerful, they often struggle with long-term dependencies due to the vanishing gradient problem. Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) address this issue by introducing memory cells and gates. For beginners, understanding LSTM components, such as the input, output, and forget gates, can be challenging. This tip breaks down LSTMs in an intuitive way, highlighting their importance and practical applications.
2025-08-22
When I first started with Power Query, it was in Excel, through the Power Pivot feature. I was amazed at how I could transform data with just a few clicks and quickly create PivotTables. Then, when Power Query appeared in Power BI, I began working with larger data sources and more complex projects.
2025-08-20
SQL Server users have been asking for native regular expression support for over two decades. There are third-party Common Language Runtime (CLR) modules that offer this functionality, but these can be complicated to install and simply aren’t possible in some environments. I want to split a string using a regular expression instead of a static string. Will that be possible in SQL Server 2025, without CLR?
2025-08-18
This is the first in a series of articles meant to provide practical solutions to common issues. In this post, we’ll talk about one of the most pervasive error messages out there:
2025-08-15
A customer has a database that is already set up in a SQL Server Availability Group. Since this database hosts sensitive data, there is a need to encrypt the primary and all secondary replicas of the data. In this article, we will walk through how this can be done.
2025-08-13
Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) emerges as a strong security paradigm for cloud-based AI systems, fundamentally operating on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Unlike conventional security models, ZTA assumes potential compromise exists within the network and requires continuous verification of every access request regardless of origin.
2025-07-09
About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.
2025-07-07
When I was perusing my LinkedIn feed the other day, I came across this thread about using SELECT *. In one of the replies, Aaron Cutshall noted that: “Another real performance killer is SELECT DISTINCT especially when combined with UNION. I have a whole list of commonly used hidden performance killers!”
2025-07-04
SQL Server 2025 improved PSPO to handle multiple predicates that might have parameter sensitivity, and that’s great! I love it when Microsoft ships a v1 feature, and then gradually iterates over to make it better. Adaptive Memory Grants were a similar investment that got improved over time, and today they’re fantastic.
2025-07-02
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
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