Beginning Professional Development
Continuing with his series on professional development, Andy Warren takes a look at funding some of your career growth and why it pays to invest in yourself.
Newsletter Changes
A few proposed changes to the newsletter. Read about them and give us some feedback on what you think.
Reverse Engineering ADTs in SQL Server 2000 - Part 3
Continuing on with his series on ADTs, Yakov Shlafman takes a look at working with schema changes when your ADT is on a column used as a primary or foreign key.
What Should A DBA Be Doing?
I came across an interesting blog post on jobs, which actually caught me eye after another blog on time spent on various things, many of which are not necessarily important to your business.
Avoid enclosing Indexed Columns in a Function in the WHERE clause
When a function is wrapped around an indexed column in the WHERE clause it will usually prevent the proper usage of that index. This article gives an example and discusses what other options are available.
Dynamic Partitioning and Dynamic Indexing
We are always searching for new ways to improve the performance of our database systems. Raghavendra Narayana brings us a new article that examines an idea for rebuilding partitions and indexes based on data access: in real time!
The September Energy Update
I think you'll be happy to know that there are interesting people out there. One of my neighbors, maybe a couple miles away, has a windmill that I've watched run regularly as I drove my daughter to school all last year. I finally grabbed their address one day and wrote them a letter, not wanting to just walk up to their door with a list of questions. I waited patiently for a couple weeks and finally got an email.
A Cynic's Top Ten Tips for IT Contractors
As autumn approaches, Patrick Index produces his ten hot chestnuts for IT Contractors like himself, with a jaundiced 'contractor's-eye view'.
Free Training
I heard on Thursday a couple weeks ago that someone who had received a free admission to the PASS conference had cancelled and wasn't able to attend. It was last minute and that pretty much ruled out any chance to have a contest, so I called a friend in Denver who's a DBA and doesn't get much of a budget for training. I offered him the admission and he said he'd let me know Friday.
Blogs
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
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...
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