Shrinking SQL Server Backup Files and Speeding Up Backups
With backup compression you can speed up our backups, while making your backups smaller.
Dealing with Failure
A minor disaster in Colorado reminds Steve about the need to prepare, and think about the failure points in our preparations.
The V1 Team’s Doomed Redesign
A new version of an existing application doesn't always provide an upgrade.
What are Inline Indexes?
New releases of SQL Server arrive at a quick pace, and it's difficult to keep up with the many features introduced in each version. In this article, Phil Factor reviews a feature you may have missed, inline indexes. He covers the syntax and the many ways they can be used and then performs some performance tests to see if they can make a difference with table variables.
Create Power BI Connection to Azure SQL Database
Learn how to use Power BI to retrieve data from an Azure SQL Database.
What should you do about memory dumps?
A SQL Server monitoring tool is warning you that you’re getting memory dumps, and you’re wondering what that means.
Building Better Stored Procedures
In a followup, this article includes discussion of more advanced features of using stored procedures.
Introduction to SQL Server Security — Part 3
SQL Server supports partially contained databases. This gives you the option of adding database users with a password inside the database. This makes the database easier to move to another instance or participate in an Always On Availability Group. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains how to work with users in contained databases.
Badly Encrypted Databases
Database encryption is hard, and somewhat controversial. Steve thinks we ought to do a better job of it.
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
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...
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
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