Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion
Communication can be challenging when we don't work closely with others. Steve draws a comparison with a popular children's show in the US.
2023-08-14
133 reads
Editorials
What Counts For a DBA: Manners
When most people were young, they had someone telling them to "Mind your manners." Such classics as: "Keep your elbows off of the table," "Use a fork," "Put on deodorant," as well as "Don't chew with your mouth open" were bandied about like there were laws of nature. However, manners differ significantly from laws in […]
2023-08-12
138 reads
What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?
Today Steve asks the question about what you do outside of work to advance your career.
2023-08-11
123 reads
How Wrong is Stack Overflow?
Steve has a few thoughts on a rant about Stack Overflow. An experienced developer thinks much of their information is wrong and things are getting worse.
2023-08-09
315 reads
Archive to the Lake
Microsoft Fabric changes the paradigm for how you might store data in your warehouse.
2023-08-07
217 reads
Small Changes, Big Results
Last week I was able to attend THAT conference in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. It was my first time in the great state of cheese, and the conference lived up to its reputation. As a developer focused conference (rather than a database conference), I didn't have much expectation that my session about automating database changes would […]
2023-08-05
1,841 reads
Flexible Work Policies are Preferred
New research says that companies with flexible work policies, hybrid or remote, find they are able to hire staff more quickly.
2023-08-04
95 reads
Constitutional AI
There is a company trying to build AI systems in a new way. Steve isn't sure what this means or if it's a good idea. Read his thoughts today.
2023-08-02
212 reads
We're Not Faster with AI
At Redgate Software, we've been trialing Copilot from GitHub with our developers. I managed to get access for this experiment and have tried a few things, though I'm not sure I've found it very useful. I'll continue to work with Copilot, but for now, I just don't find Copilot AI helping me with the types […]
2023-07-31
204 reads
Looking Back and Forward
I took part in a podcast this week, Arrested DevOps. I did one with them once before, almost ten years ago. The host and I were both a little surprised that it had been so long. This caused us to look back a bit. Interestingly enough, ten years ago meant I was only about two […]
2023-07-29
60 reads
Blogs
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Forums
AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
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