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

Maintenance Plans - Backups and Removing Old Files

Andy has written several good articles for us on maintenance plans - including some stuff that makes us a little more likely to use them! This week he talks about how and when old backups are removed by maintenance plans. A page turner! Well, it's only one page, but you know what we mean!

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2002-06-10

7,597 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Maintenance Plans - Behind the Scenes

Andy did "Under the Covers" last week, what the heck will it be next week? Read this article to see how maintenance plans update statistics, rebuild indexes, and remove free space from your databases. Add your comments to the article, maybe even a suggestion or two for better titles!

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2002-05-27

10,428 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Non-Continous Replicaton and The LogReader

Last year Andy wrote about turning off the log reader as a way to reduce the overhead on a server, primarily when you have many logreaders running. In this follow up article he talks about the downside of using this technique and how the behavior of the logreader can be "tweaked" to make using non-continuous replication a little less of a headache.

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2002-03-28

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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