Disaster Recovery: How to regain your lost sysadmin access
This article shows you the process which you require to regain your sysadmin access.
Unit Testing Myths and Practices
We all understand the value of Unit Testing, but how come so few organisations maintain unit tests for their in-house applications? We can no longer pretend that unit testing is a universal panacea for ensuring less-buggy applications. Instead, we should be prepared to actively justify the use of unit tests, and be more savvy about where in the development cycle the unit test resources should be most effectively used.
An Implementation of the FNV1a Hash Algorithm for SQL Server
Three CLR-resident functions for 16-, 32-, and 64-bit FNV1a hashing
Putting JSON on an equal footing to XML
In SQL Server, we treat XML with a reverence that is disproportionate to its importance. The SQL Server team have indeed gone big on XML, as Michael Cole’s book reveals. The industry has gone big in another direction: JSON.
TSQL Challenge 76 - Identify the sequence of accounting transactions
The challenge is to identify the sequence of accounting transactions.
How to Kill a Company in One Step or Save it in Three
The majority of companies that suffer a major data loss subsequently go out of business. Wesley David remembers vividly the day when the organisation he worked for found that they couldn't restore their data, and the subsequent struggles that ensued. Shoulda-woulda-coulda.
SQL Saturday #108 - Redmond
Come to a free day of SQL Server training on Feb 25, 2012 in Redmond, WA.
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