Making Good Use of SQL Server Auditing
SQL Server Auditing is a powerful out-of-the box toolset that captures auditing information and writes to a file or the Event Log. This article examines the little things that might snag you up.
How SQL Server monitoring benefits your whole organization.
The 2019 State of SQL Server Monitoring report showed how instrumental monitoring is to managing server estates. In this guide, we go further, demonstrating how monitoring can benefit your entire organization. From development to IT management, and from finance to the C-suite. Download your free copy of the guide today
Best Practices and Band Plans
Grant Fritchey explains how database best practices should be followed more like those in Ham radio.
Keeping tables online during loading with schema swapping using SSIS
In this article, we discuss how schema swapping method can be used to keep tables online during the load process.
Help! SQL Server 2008 is Still Here!
Your company is ignoring the news: SQL Server 2008 and 2008R2 are officially out of support as of today, but nothing’s changing at your company. You still have SQL Server 2008 in production, and you’re a little nervous. How should you approach the conversations with management? Brent Ozar will help: he;s been there too.
Practical steps for end-to-end data protection
If you plan to make production data available for development and test purposes, you'll need to understand which columns contain personal or sensitive data, create a data catalog to record those decisions, devise and implement a data masking, and then provision the sanitized database copies. Richard Macaskill show how to automate as much of this process as possible.
Blogs
RANK() vs DENSE_RANK(): #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I saw an article recently...
Using CAT for Testing of Data Agents
In last months one of the scenarios where you can use AI has been...
Forums
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral Meant to Me
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral...
Doing Good at SQL Server Central
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Doing Good at SQL Server...
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