Cloud Outages
It seems that we regularly hear about outages from various cloud services. Steve Jones comments that we are likely to have this happen more and more, but it's shouldn't happen at a rate greater than in house IT services.
TSQL Challenge 58 - Playing Chess in TSQL – Part 1
Your job is to read the input string and generate a result set that represents the position of pieces in a chess board.
What's holding you back?
If you’re not where you want to be in your career, then what do you think is holding you back?
Creating a Reporting Services Histogram Chart for Statistical Distribution Analysis
Typically transactional data is quite detailed and analyzing an entire dataset on a graph is not feasible. Generally such data is analyzed using some form of aggregation or frequency distribution. One of the specialized charts generally used in Reporting Services for statistical distribution is Histogram Charts. In this tip we look at how Histogram Charts can be used for statistical distribution analysis and how to create and configure this type of chart in SSRS.
Index Management
This article demonstrates an Index Management strategy to tackle day to day performance issues due to improper indexes.
Part 1: The Database Administrator's Primary Responsibility
SQL Server Essentials Part 1: A look at the key responsibility of a DBA and why it is so vital.
The Desire for Control
This Friday Steve Jones asks you if you want more knobs for SQL Server or less? It's a debate that balances the need for the DBA to know more with the resources Microsoft spends to build better tuning into the product.
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.
Setting up linked servers with an out-of-process OLEDB provider
There is an inprocess setting for linked servers. Have you ever used it? Gianluca Sartori gives a look at what the implications are for this.
Blogs
RANK() vs DENSE_RANK(): #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I saw an article recently...
Using CAT for Testing of Data Agents
In last months one of the scenarios where you can use AI has been...
Forums
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral Meant to Me
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral...
Doing Good at SQL Server Central
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Doing Good at SQL Server...
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