Dotted Line Relationships Are Everywhere – Get Good at Them!
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Andy talks about the relationships we have at work with our management and how sometimes the indirect reports are hard to deal with.
Are you using Microsoft’s Azure platform?
We are conducting new product research and are keen to speak to people who have any experience (good or bad!) using Microsoft's SQL or Windows Azure. If you're interested and would like to get involved--tell us your frustrations, shape a new product, test-drive betas etc
Statistics on Ascending Columns
It comes as rather a shock to find out that one of the commonest circumstances in an OLTP database, an ascending primary key with most querying on the latest records, can throw the judgement of the Query Optimiser to the extent that perfomance nose-dives. Fabiano Amorim once again dons snorkel and goggles to explore the murky depths of execution plans to find out why.
Cloud Common Sense
Moving to the cloud, or any other type of outsourcing should be done with common sense, as Steve discusses today. That means keeping control of your backups.
Adding Custom Code to the Reporting Services 2008 R2
There are numerous circumstances when we wish to add a custom function to a SSRS report in order to cater for needs of the customer which exceeds the capability of the built-in functions in SSRS. In these scenarios we will have to write our own functions. In this article you will see how to add custom code to SSRS.
Architecture Career Paths for SQL Server Professionals
On Thursday September 15th, MCM Robert Davis will discuss the architect jobs and their meanings.
Jeff Moden elected Exceptional DBA of 2011
We are pleased to announce that Jeff Moden has been elected by judges and the SQL Server community as the Exceptional DBA of 2011.
Not on the Same Page
It seems that security staff and other technical people are not always on the same page. Steve Jones says that we should be working to take security more seriously.
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