SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Build Book of News

Every year Microsoft has held the Build conference for developers. I've been lucky enough to go a few times, and I was hoping to get the chance to attend again. With the pandemic, the entire event went virtual, and was held across 48 continuous hours. I was slightly disappointed as a few sessions I wanted […]

Technical Article

[Video] Free DBA Training Month: Configuring TempDB, Lock Pages in Memory, and the DAC

While you’re stuck inside wondering if you’ll ever be able to attend a user group meeting again, I’m giving you free access to training materials that your boss probably wouldn’t have been nice enough to buy you anyway. So far this week, we’ve covered DBCC CHECKDB, how to set up Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts, and restoring for oops deletes. Today, let’s talk about two common configuration issues. Don’t dilly-dally on these though: these blog posts will be online during May only, and they’ll disappear on June 1.

SQLServerCentral Article

The IDENTITY Column Property

There are a number of ways to generate key values in SQL Server tables including the IDENTITY column property, the NEWID() function and more recently, SEQUENCES. The IDENTITY column property is the earliest of these methods. It was introduced very early in the history of SQL Server and it is arguably the simplest approach. Though old, IDENTITY is still maintained in modern versions of SQL Server and is still relevant for simple use cases.

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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