SQL Server Professionals Survey – Win $50 Amazon voucher!
Take part in a simple 5-minute survey for SQL Server Professionals and win one of two $50 Amazon vouchers.
Field Level Auditing using Change Data Capture – Part 2
Second part of two part article on Change Data Capture for field level auditing and marting that data using SSIS for reports. I uploaded the entire Word document that includes the images.
Real Time Dangers
Steve Jones notes that our expert systems might not handle every situation well, and the quest to move towards more real time decision making can involve dangers if a human is not in the loop.
Script to calculate the Median value for SQL Server data
The standard SQL language has a number of aggregate functions like: SUM, MIN, MAX, AVG, but a common statistics function that SQL Server does not have is a built-in aggregate function for median. The median is the value that falls in the middle of a sorted resultset with equal parts that are smaller and equal parts that are greater. Since there is no built-in implementation for the median, the following is a simple solution I put together to find the median.
Going Green in Software Development
Today Steve Jones talks about the impact of better software programming on the energy use in your company's data center.
Never offend a captive audience
Write what you choose to when the reader can, in turn, choose not to read your work; but when you are writing about Technology, you have a captive audience. They need to read your work to keep abreast of the technology. Don't gratuitously offend them. It is not the action of a gentleman, D____it!
Quick and Dirty DR Solution Using Robocopy
This article covers how to use robocopy with SQL Server Agent to copy database backup files to another server.
Extracting and Loading SharePoint Data in SQL Server Integration Services
The SharePoint List Source and Destination Sample available on Codeplex provides an optimized solution with an easy-to-use interface for getting data out of or into a SharePoint list. The sample also includes an API for accomplishing these tasks efficiently outside of SQL Server Integration Services.
ETL
Today we have an editorial that was originally published on Aug 31, 2006 as Steve is traveling at DevConnections. It still seems relevant, so answer the poll this week.
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