Andy Warren

I started my SQL journey here at SQLServerCentral as one of the founders, helping to build a place to share and learn that continues to thrive under the editorial guidance of my friend Steve Jones. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years ranging from our local SQL group (oPASS, SQLOrlando) to serving on the Board of Directors of PASS to designing and building the framework of SQLSaturday (which has gone on to produce more than 1000 locally managed events since we started in 2007). These days I manage a DBA team, but over the years I've been a trainer, consultant, contractor, and DBA. I'm rarely present on social media, the best way to contact me is here, LinkedIn, or via email.

SQLServerCentral Article

Standards Are a Good Thing

This week we have another article from Andy that discusses some changes he made at work in conjunction with clustering all his database servers. Not a how-to, just comments about what was changed and why. Worth reading just for the reminder about the potential gotcha that @@ServerName can represent.

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2003-04-09

6,179 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

We Studied, We Passed, Was It Worth It?

Several months ago Andy posted a 'Review of Developing Windows Based Applications for VB.Net and C#.Net' and mentioned that his company was requiring all developers to achieve the MCAD within 12 months. Read this to find out how the first exam went, how they studied, what they achieved, and their plans for taking the rest of the exams.

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2003-03-21

7,753 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Managing Jobs - Part 2

Jobs are pretty basic aren't they? They are until you get a couple hundred, or a thousand. Andy continues talking about managing jobs by standardizing how you handle notifications and failures, and talks about an interesting idea to monitor jobs separately from SQL Agent. Worth reading!

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2003-02-14

8,420 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Managing Jobs - Part 1

How many jobs do you have? 10? 100? 1000? Andy makes the point that what works to manage for a small number of jobs doesn't work when that number doubles or triples (well, unless you only had 1 job to start with!). In part one of two, this article looks at ideas for using categories and naming conventions to get things under control.

(1)

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2003-01-31

10,522 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Worst Practice - Bad Comments

This one is pretty interesting, Andy discusses a few things he sees in comments that not only fail to add value, they end up costing extra time. There's room for discussion here, but definitely a discussion worth having - comments can make you or break you, here's a chance to think about what you think is important in commenting and pass that on to your development team.

(2)

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2003-01-23

11,110 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Another Disaster (Almost)

Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically.

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2003-01-14

7,063 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Default Values and Named Parameters for Stored Procs

Are you using default values for your parameters? Using named parameters when you call the proc or passing the values by ordinal? Should you be? Andy thinks 6 out of 10 of our readers will agree with his point of view, we'll be a little more conservative and guess that 5 of out 10 will be closer.

(1)

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2003-01-08

8,237 reads

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Question of the Day

String Similarity I

On SQL Server 2025, when I run this, what is returned?

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('SQL Server', 'MySQL')

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