My name is James Anderson and I am a SQL Server production DBA in the south of the UK. I have been working with databases since 2008. The first RDBMS I worked on was Paradox and I never want to see it again. I quickly moved to using T-SQL in SQL Server 2005. I have worked on every version of the product since. I enjoy query tuning and server optimisation. I detest transactional replication.

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Presenting with Visual Studio Code

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A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...

Advice I Like: In 100 Years

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In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...

dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides

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At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...

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AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

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Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...

connections vs apis

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hi , i hear more and more that we have too many connections to...

is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs

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Hi, i'm running vs2022.   I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...

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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