The Importance of Database Indexing
In this article, James Munro demonstrates an example of a simple query without an index and then that same query again with the index. A simple introduction to database indexing.
What Not To Say
Steve Jones has some advice for data professionals today. These are a few things that your boss doesn't want to hear, and you probably don't want to say.
Query Folding in Power Query to Improve Performance
In this tip Koen Verbeeck discusses query folding, how you can take advantage from it and how to make sure query folding takes place.
Finding Production Drift
The changes made to production can be problematic at times. Steve Jones notes we can't prevent them, but we can look for them.
Cybercrime - the Dark Edges of the Internet
Criminal activity is a growing menace on the internet: This inevitably means more diligence is required by legitimate users in the face of an increasingly sophisticated criminal threat. Robert Sheldon describes some of the emerging threats and risks.
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The MidnightDBAs release Minion Backup
The MidnightDBA team is announcing the release of a new, free backup solution for SQL Server: Minion Backup. We created Minion Backup (or MB, for short) to be the most flexible, feature-rich backup solution possible.
Who Cares About Your Data?
The observation that people hear what they want to hear is not a new one, and yet the extent to which people will go out of their way to ignore or misinterpret evidence can still surprise.
Converting Comma Separated Value to Rows and Vice Versa in SQL Server
Often while reporting you will encounter a situation where you will have comma separated values in a single column but you want to report them in rows. In other cases you might have values in multiple rows and want them to be a single value separated by comma or some other character. Arshad Ali demonstrates how to write queries in SQL Server to handle these scenarios quickly.
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
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25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral Meant to Me
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Doing Good at SQL Server Central
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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