A Break from Data
This Friday, before the Memorial Day holiday in the US, Steve Jones wants to know how you would spend your break from work.
The User Defined Server Roles in SQL Server 2012
This article describes how to create user defined server roles and use stored procedures and queries related.
Backups, What Are They Good For?
We've heard the confessional story from Pixar that Toy Story 2 was almost lost due to a bad backup, but sometimes there is no 'almost'. Grant Fritchey casts a sympathetic eye over some catastrophic data losses, and gives advice on how to avoid what he has termed an RGE (résumé generating event).
Making New Infrastructure Investments
One of the areas where the cloud may have the most impact is with new infrastructure improvements. Steve Jones talks about a few companies that are using the cloud in different ways.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services - Package and Project Parameters
In SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced SQL Server Data Tools to accommodate the dynamic nature of SSIS constructs in the form of package and project parameters. This approach lets you combine multi-package projects into a single unit, eliminating the possibility of breaking dependencies between parent and child packages during subsequent deployments.
Work around for calculating age using the SQL Server DateDiff function
Have you ever wanted to compute age, but the results from the DATEDIFF function seemed to be wrong some of the time? This tip covers why the DATEDIFF function does not always reliably compute age.
New features in SQL 2012, the contained database
This article describe the problems about the migration of the databases and logins and the new feature contained databases
The TCO of the Cloud
When is the cloud right for your databases? Steve Jones talks about some metrics and ways you can measure your usage to determine when it makes sense.
SQL Server Central Webinar Series #18 - Don’t Lose Your Data: Top Tips for Backup, Verification and Restore
Join us on May 22, 4:00GMT to learn how to include verification as a part of your backup and recovery strategy with Grant Fritchey.
Windows Azure from a Data Perspective
Before creating a data application in Windows Azure, it is important to make choices based on the type of data you have, as well as the security and the business requirements. There are a wide range of options, because Windows Azure has intrinsic data storage, completely separate from SQL Azure, that is highly available and replicated. Your data requirements are likely to dictate the type of data storage options you choose.
Blogs
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
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...
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