Eight Steps to Effective SQL Server Monitoring
If you need to start monitoring your SQL Server instances and database, and there are many good reasons to do so, Tony Davis gives you the eight essential steps to diagnosing problems quickly.
SQL Server Central Webinar Series #25 - Best Practices in Database Deployment Part 1: Aug 27th @ 4PM BST
Join Grant Fritchey (SQL Server MVP) as he tackles the most common problems and pitfalls of database deployment. He will explain how you (and your team) can make your deployment process, faster, more efficient and most importantly less stressful!
Teach Business Users How To Create Power View Reports With SQL Server Data Sources
Power View is a new tool for intuitive ad hoc SQL Server reporting which provides an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience to the business users. But how do you create these Power View reports? Check out this tip to learn more.
SQL Saturday #246 Salt Lake City
SQL Saturday visits Salt Lake City on September 7 for a free day of SQL Server training and networking. SQL Saturday has partnered with with the Utah Hadoop User Group and Utah Geeks Events to create the Big Mountain Data Conference.
The Costs of Data
Information is free, but data certainly has a cost. Especially as there are real costs to storing and managing large volumes of bits and bytes.
Getting started with Power View Reports with SharePoint, Excel and SQL Server
Microsoft Business Intelligence stack provides several tools for analyzing data from different perspectives, in different format and different ways. Power View is a new addition to this arsenal which provides intuitive ad hoc reporting capabilities for business users to provide an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience. But how does it work and how to get started with it?
Always Abstract
When developing your code, should you use views? There are reasons why you might choose to do so, or not do so, however Steve Jones thinks you should consider abstracting your systems.
News From EAP Testing
Jonathan Allen takes a peak at the EAP release of SQL Prompt 6 and some of the cool new things you can do to speed up writing SQL.
Guidance
When you are looking to help someone improve performance on a system, there isn't a single set of steps you provide. The advice and guidance you provide will vary, depending on the situation.
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