Handling Aggregations on a Poorly Designed Database
When the database design is not great, you may have to write some creative queries to get what you need.
The Dangers of using Float or Real Datatypes
Floating point datatypes accommodate very big numbers but sacrifice precision. They are handy for some types of scientific calculations, but are dangerous when used more widely, because they can introduce big rounding errors.
Using SQL Server RAND Function Deep Dive
Dr. Dallas Snider, a MSSQLTips author, mentioned that SQL Server RAND() function could generate random values uniformly distributed from 0 through 1, exclusive. He generated random numbers from the normal distribution with a specific mean and standard deviation.
A New World of Data
I started in the early days of SQL Server, when having a gigabyte of disk storage was unheard of, much less a gigabyte of RAM. My watch has more storage space than the mainframe we replaced with an early version of SQL Server years ago. The technical possibilities and amounts of data we are capable […]
A quick search without an index
Alex Chamchourine explains how he managed to find a row in a billion row table without an index.
Checking for Database Events Using Extended Events and SQL Monitor
You need to make sure that nobody tampers with your production databases, or really any databases outside Development. Even if you weren't of a nervous disposition, you'd want to know if a database was stopped or removed. You'd also be intrigued by the sudden unrehearsed addition of a database to a production server.
Simple DBCC CHECKDB process to report on database corruption for all SQL Server databases
As DBAs, we all know how important it is to check all of the SQL Server databases under our care for potential corruption issues. However, to accomplish that, we might not have the time to do any of the following:
Collections
Problem The usage of a collection of integers in some scenarios is considered to be optimal because of the overhead involved by the creation of another user table used just to store numbers, which is the most common solution. What are collections of integers? They are lists or arrays consisting of integers. The number of […]
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