Editorials

SQLServerCentral Editorial

How Microsoft Fabric Is Reshaping Data Value

The data professional’s world is changing and I know you hear this from me in editorials, blogs posts and social media, but it’s the truth. With the rise of Microsoft Fabric, we’re not just seeing another platform shift; we’re witnessing a redefinition of how data is valued, governed, and protected across the enterprise. Fabric isn’t […]

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2025-07-22

245 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Life's Little Frustrations

As with others, I've had to deal with death in the family recently. Some other family members are dealing with cancer (a few friends too). Happily none of us has recently been a disaster zone, but that's happened too. So yeah, big, nasty scary stuff happens in life. However, for most of us, most of […]

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2025-07-19

95 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Databases and Disasters

I was just reading about how the Philippines are working to update their databases in support of faster and better responses in the case of an emergency. While I do volunteer for some of the local emergency services, I'm right at the bottom of the heap as just a radio operator. I don't have any […]

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2025-07-18

118 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

People Make Odd Choices

One of my favorite things about going to in-person events is just the time when we're sitting around chatting, out in the hallway, over at the vendor booths, maybe in the speaker room. Any of them. Inevitably, you start to get what I would call "sea stories" (Navy & Coasties, "war stories" for the pickles, […]

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2025-07-14

154 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Navigating Multi Platform Realities in My Database Life

Working across Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, I've learned that the real challenge isn’t just knowing each platform, but understanding the subtle differences in terminology, syntax, and mindset, and staying open to learning on the fly every time I jump in.  The “Sacred Six” are rules that I’ve learned to live by and accept. […]

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2025-07-12

84 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Formatting Dates and Times: The SQL Dialect Divide

If you’ve ever had to format dates and times in SQL, you’ve probably come across one of the most jarring realities of working across platforms: every major RDBMS does it differently and sometimes confusingly.  What’s a TO_CHAR() in Oracle becomes FORMAT() or CONVERT() in SQL Server, and its sort of the same in PostgreSQL… but […]

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2025-07-11

214 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

In Praise of Simplicity or The Power of Plain Language in a Buzzword World

There’s a moment I experience all too often in tech meetings, presentations, or vendor demos where someone starts talking, and instead of clarity, I get hit with a tidal wave of jargon: “synergizing AI-driven orchestration pipelines for real-time actionable insights using cloud-native microservices and agentic AI to serve as a digital twin.” And somewhere in […]

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2025-07-09

135 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Mindset of a Database Administrator: A Love Letter to Risk Aversion

Sometimes, while working on something as foundational as SQL Server Central, (which is a temporary responsibility for Grant, John and I while Steve is on sabbatical) I catch myself falling into an old, familiar loop double-checking my choices, second-guessing even the most minor decisions, as is the norm for anyone who’s a database administrator (or […]

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2025-07-08

175 reads

Blogs

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Dynamic Unpivot

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I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...

Writing as an Art and a Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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String Similarity II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

String Similarity II

What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?

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