It's Almost Always the Humans
Today we have a reprint of an editorial from Sept 19, 2005 as Steve Jones is on vacation. In this one, Steve Jones reminds companies that saving money sometimes on Customer Service isn't as easy as you think.
Which of Your Stored Procedures are Using the Most Resources?
Dynamic Management Views and Functions aren't always easy to understand. However, they are the easiest way of finding out which of your stored procedures are using up the most resources. Greg takes the time to explain how and why these DMVs and DMFs get their information. Suddenly, it all gets clearer.
How To Get Table Row Counts Quickly And Painlessly
Use sysindexes\DMVs insead of select count(*) to retreive table row counts
31 Days of SSIS – Generating Row Numbers (23/31)
31 Days of SSIS
It’s Sunday afternoon and a good time to be putting up post twenty-three for the 31 Days...
Internals and Performance class in Dallas
At last, my blog is starting to pay real dividends. Not only do I get the opportunity to publish my...
Showplan Operator of the Week - Merge Interval
When Fabiano agreed to undertake the epic task of describing each showplan operator, none of us quite predicted the interesting ways that the series helps to understand how the query optimizer works. With the Merge Interval, Fabiano comes up with some insights about the way that the Query optimizer handles overlapping ranges efficiently.
Master Immersion Events from SQLskills.com
A new series of courses is available from SQLskills to help you better learn to manage and tune your SQL Server instances. These classes are designed to help you complete the MCM certification, but are also valuable for anyone that wants to become a better SQL Server DBA.
Master Training
Steve Jones talks about the value of deep training. He is aiming to get some from SQLskills this year as part of their MCM training series, even without trying to pass the certification.
SQL Server Central Webinar Series #8: Creating smaller and comprehensively verified backups
The next webinar from SQLServerCentral will look at backups and how you can create faster, smaller, and verified backups. Join Steve Jones and Rodney Landrum for this presentation on SQL Backup Pro and SQL Virtual Restore
31 Days of SSIS – Data Flow Expressions (22/31)
31 Days of SSIS
Today, we continue on with the 31 Days of SSIS blog series. Yesterday’s post was on the...
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