Recovery Models
Learn the basics of recovery models in this short article from SQL Server guru and MVP, Gail Shaw.
Where Do You Park?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Most people work in an office and need to commute, which brings with it the inevitable fight for parking in many companies. How is it handled for you?
Preventing Problems in SQL Server
It is never a good idea to let your users be the ones to tell you of database server outages. It is far better to be able to spot potential problems by being alerted for the most relevant conditions on your servers at the best threshold. This will take time and patience, but the reward will be an alerting system which allows you to deal more effectively with issues before they involve system down-time.
The Special Cloud
Amazon has built a cloud just for the US government. Will we see more specialized clouds in the future that might let us move some of our data to the cloud?
How to Performance Tune the Microsoft SQL Server tempdb Database
If your SQL Server’s tempdb database is heavily used by your application(s), consider locating it on an array of its own (such as RAID 1 or RAID 10). This will allow disk I/O to be more evenly distributed, reducing disk I/O contention issues, and speeding up SQL Server’s overall performance.
An Investment in Knowledge
Inspired by a quote from Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jones talks about investing in your career.
Raw Materials - The Little Engine that Could
Total Information Awareness can destroy your sanity. Get used to it.
Speeding up database access - part 4 Fixing expensive queries
Part 4 of a series from Matt Perdeck on speeding up your database access. This is a great series for developers. This is based on the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets.
Displaying Multiple Series on an SSRS Chart using Chart Area
A report might contain multiple data series on a chart, which can have considerably varying scales but common category groups. In such cases where this a big difference in scales, the data series with the lower scale can become obscured. In this tip we will take a look at how to solve this problem using Chart Areas.
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