The In-House Expert - WMV
Are specialists worth keeping inside of a company? Or does it pay to hire generalists and then get consultants as needed? Steve Jones comments on the choices you might face as your career grows.
A Pay Raise
There's a shortage of IT workers, which should lead to a pay raise for some people. Steve Jones takes a look at some recent news about IT salaries.
A Reporting System Architecture
This article describes one method of implementing a reporting system in SQL Server 2005
SUN DB
The purchase of MySQL by Sun is an interesting move by Sun, which has pondered it's own database product.
Using Data Warehouse for CRM
Usually a data warehouse is used for some sort of Business Intelligence system. Data warehousing experts Vincent Rainardi and Amar Gaddam bring us another great article on warehousing with a look at how a warehouse might be used for a CRM system.
Building Reliable, Asynchronous Database Applications Using Service Broker
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Broker is a new platform for building distributed asynchronous database applications. Including an asynchronous, reliable messaging feature in the SQL Server database makes it possible to build a variety of database applications that were difficult, if not impossible, to build before.
New datetime datatypes in SQL Server 2008
Older versions of SQL Server had only one datatype to store both the date and time values. In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft introduces a set of new datatypes that store date and time individually, and both date and time together.
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
Safe and Reliable Transport of Farm Machinery: Solutions of the Modern Agricultu
Ship A1 Auto Transport is a reliable provider of services who delivers safe and...
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