Brad McGehee

Brad M. McGehee is a MCSE+I, MCSD, and MCT (former) with a Bachelors’ degree in Economics and a Masters in Business Administration. Currently the Director of DBA Education for Red Gate Software, Brad is an accomplished Microsoft SQL Server MVP with over 13 years’ SQL Server experience, and over 6 years’ training experience.

Brad is a frequent speaker at SQL PASS, SQL Connections, SQLTeach, SQL Saturdays, TechFests, Code Camps, SQL Server user groups, and other industry seminars, where he shares his 13 years’ cumulative knowledge.

Brad was the founder of the popular community site SQL-Server-Performance.Com, and operated it from 2000 through 2006, where he wrote over one million words on SQL Server topics.

In 2008, Brad attended 16 conferences/user group events, presented 26 sessions, and had 1,402 people attend them.

A well-respected and trusted name in SQL Server literature, Brad is the author or co-author of more than 14 technical books and over 100 published articles. His most recent books include “How to Become an Exceptional DBA,” and “Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server 2008: The Top Ten New Features for DBAs,” and “Mastering SQL Server Profiler.”

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I have been reading SQLServerCentral for about 15 years and somehow never posted. This...

Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

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By Brian Knight

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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