Continuous Releases
The idea of continuous development, integration and release can be a way to get your software in use by clients quicker. Steve Jones talks about releases, and some benefits you might get.
Instant File Initialization and restores
Instant file initialization also has its advantages when you restore a SQLServer database. This article will show you why.
SQL Server 2012 Certifications Revamped
Forget what you thought you knew about SQL Server certification, as Microsoft has completely redesigned the SQL Server 2012 certification program, making is more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to attain.
Perform Routine Server Checks Using PowerShell
Database administrators tend to perform a lot of routine checks, referred to as sanity checks, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Rob Gravelle shows you how to write some PowerShell scripts to automate a couple of fairly common sanity checks.
SQL Relay 2012
This May brings SQL Server experts to your locality; full day seminars in Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and London. Overview sessions from Microsoft in the morning, Deep Dive sessions in the afternoon from SQL Server MVP's and evening community events.
Password Handling
A system administrator can set a good example with the passwords they give to users or a bad example. Which one do you set?
The Trouble with Transactional Replication and large articles.
This article will show you one way to quickly restore SQL Server replication with huge tables.
Implementing Foreach Looping Logic in SSIS
With SSIS, it is possible to implement looping logic into SSIS's control flow in order to define a repeating workflow in a package for each member of a collection of objects. Rob Sheldon explains how to use this valuable feature of SSIS.
Do Interviews Work?
Interviews are the way we primarily make hiring decisions but as Steve Jones notes, we don't really end up doing a very good job of picking good employees in many cases.
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