Technical Article

Calculating Percentage Change

To provide data analysis you may need to perform some basic trend analysis. For example, if you want to identify the percentage of change in the number of orders received from one month to the next. The challenge to providing that on the fly is the change can be either an increase or a decrease, […]

(1)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-03-02 (first published: )

6,527 reads

Technical Article

Validating Canadian Postal Codes

For fellow Canadians and neighbours to the south, you may find useful a function to validate the formatting of a Canadian postal code.  More than once I've had to work with web programmers on checking that a postal code meets the A1A1A1 style, so carry around a function that simply returns a true/false bit if […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-01-15 (first published: )

1,082 reads

Technical Article

Formatting Dates

There are many ways to format dates, and rather that reinvent the wheel each time I've found it helpful to have a user defined function always available. As a function it of courses processes on each row, and to enable the most flexibility the formatting style is passed simply as a parameter. Year month and […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2005-08-31 (first published: )

477 reads

Technical Article

Automatically Restoring from Production

Came across a great script from Ken Kaufman on copying backups using xp_cmdshell.  Thought I'd contribute a script I wrote that builds on that to restore the latest production backup to a testing or development server.  In this case I routinely create all my production backups to a network share and then use that source […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-12-16

653 reads

Blogs

Presenting with Visual Studio Code

By

A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...

Advice I Like: In 100 Years

By

In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...

dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides

By

At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

By inHouseDBA

Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...

connections vs apis

By stan

hi , i hear more and more that we have too many connections to...

is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs

By stan

Hi, i'm running vs2022.   I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...

Visit the forum

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