Master Data Services - SSIS MDM Load
The article will provide an overview of Master Data Services and a sample SSIS Package.
Ten Problems with XQuery and the SQL/XML Standard
XQuery and SQL/XML standard are processors for XML. SQL/XML was designed to try to match the capabilities of XQuery as closely as possible and XQuery was designed not only to support XML, but also to support relational processing. Read on to learn why this may have a negative influence on their capabilities.
Overusing Identities
Do you put an identity column on every table? That might be a bad habit you want to kick, but not all at once. Steve Jones comments on this common data modeling practice.
Randomizing Result Sets with NEWID
Seth Delconte brings us a technique to solve a common request. Using the NEWID function to return a random record from a result set.
Reaching for the Clouds
This past week's news had a lot of news about cloud computing and Steve Jones comments on a few database related items.
IntelliSense Slow to Refresh
IntelliSense in SQL Server 2008 can sometimes not be very intelligent. It’s there to help you can sometimes cause more...
Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 General Maintenance
This document contains steps that will assist you in the day-to-day SQL Server 2008 RTM Enterprise Edition (non-clustered) operations. It defines the basics of standard maintenance and checks for a single Instance of SQL Server 2008, and should be used as a starting point.
Using a Parent Child Hierarchy in SQL Server to Implement a Custom Security Scheme
I have a requirement to implement a custom security scheme where roles and the user's place in the organization hierarchy are used to determine which customers a user can access. In particular the requirements are that a sales person can only access their customers and any other role can access any customer in their level of the organization hierarchy and below. We have a simple hierarchy that is made up of regions and offices. Can you provide us with an example of how to do this?
Timing is Everything
For this Friday poll, Steve Jones asks about storing time values. Should they always be in UTC? Does that solve more problems than it creates?
Exceptional PowerShell DBA Pt 3 - Collation and Fragmentation
In this final look into his everyday essentials, Laerte Junior provides some useful scripts for the DBA that use an alternative way of error-logging. He shows how to use a PowerShell script to check and, if necessary, to defragment your indexes, write data to a SQL Server table, and change the collation for a table. Being an exceptional DBA just got a little easier.
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