Sharing Your Database Server
Is is time to consider sharing your database server with other applications? Steve Jones thinks with today's powerful servers and changes to licensing, this might make sense.
Optimal Storage of IP addresses in a SQL Server database
Often databases are used with web-based interfaces and recording the IP address of the end user can assist with debugging, marketing, bandwidth planning and collation selection to name a few. In a scenario where each page access is logged, is there an optimal way to store IP addresses?
Survey: what features do you want from a backup tool?
We’d like your thoughts on what new features should go into our backup tools. Let us know by completing this short survey.
Layers of Security
A good security scheme will contain many layers. Today Steve Jones talks about one of those: good habits.
Me, myself and Powershell
Why should any SQLserver administrator, DBA, or Developer be interested in Powershell? Johan Bijens presents a few reasons today.
3 SQL Join Concepts to Help You Choose the Right Join
What do SQL joins and the "teach a man to fish" Chinese proverb have in common? SQL joins, like regular expressions, are one of those commonplace programming tasks in which true success is entirely dependent upon your ability to conceptualize the outcome. Fail to do so and you'll likely wind up spending a few hours in a frustrating round of trial and error. Like regular expressions, the proliferation of online examples has actually contributed to the frustration, providing the equivalent of a day's worth of fish rather than the proverbial fishing pool.
Automatically Scripting Out Permissions for Cross Environment Restores
This article from Warren Campbell shows a process to recreate permissions in development environments after restoring a database from a production instance.
Not having TDE in all editions is stupid
Transparent Data Encryption is only available in Enterprise Edition and above. Steve Jones thinks that's a mistake.
Bringing Alerts and Operators together with Notifications
FatherJack shows you how to check that your alerts and notifications are linked up so that when an Alert condition is met that you get the appropriate Notifications sent to Operators.
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