Managing Database Data Usage With Custom Space Alerts
A quick how-to on configuring SQL Server Agent alerts to manage file space usage.
Maintaining SQL Server default trace historical events for analysis and reporting
I often see questions online where someone wants to find out who started a trace, when tempdb last had an autogrow event, or when the last full backup for master occurred. Since these and other events are captured by the default trace, but the default trace only keeps five 20MB rollover files by default. This means that the event you are after may no longer be there, depending on how long ago it was and how busy your server happens to be. Unfortunately, people often need to find this information well after the fact.
Create Your Own Intense Interview
Today Steve Jones talks about interviews and the way in which he approaches them to make sure that the job is the best fit for both the company and the candidate.
SSIS FTP Task – Receive Files from FTP Site
This article will show you how to configure the FTP task in SSIS to recieve files from remote server using the FTP protocol.
Database Continuous Integration 101
We talk a lot about continuous integration here on the Atlassian Dev Tools blog, and many readers are bonafide CI gurus. Now that you are integrating your application code, test code, config files and deploy scripts, are you ready to take it to the next level? An increasing number of engineering shops are starting to bring the continuous integration discipline into their database development.
The PoSh DBA: Grown-Up PowerShell Functions
Laerte Junior goes step-by-step through the process of tidying up and making more reusable an untidy collection of PowerShell routines, showing how pipelines and advanced functions can make PowerShell more effective in helping to automate many of the working DBA's chores.
Connect QuickBooks to SQL Server through SSIS
This example uses an SSIS workflow to populate a database with QuickBooks data.
Happy Memorial Day 2012
It's Memorial Day in the US and Steve out is paying tribute to our soldiers and cutting grass on the tractor. He's left you a blooper reel to enjoy.
To Specialize or Not to Specialize: that is the $132,000 Question
In a guest editorial, Rodney Landrum reflects on his career path as a an information-hungry generalist.
Simple step by step process to import MS Access data into SQL Server using SSIS
Sometimes we need to import information from MS Access. We could use the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant, but sometimes we need to add custom transformations and it is necessary to use more sophisticated tools. In this tip, we are going to walk through step by step how to migrate a MS Access table to SQL Server using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
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