Andy Warren

I started my SQL journey here at SQLServerCentral as one of the founders, helping to build a place to share and learn that continues to thrive under the editorial guidance of my friend Steve Jones. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years ranging from our local SQL group (oPASS, SQLOrlando) to serving on the Board of Directors of PASS to designing and building the framework of SQLSaturday (which has gone on to produce more than 1000 locally managed events since we started in 2007). These days I manage a DBA team, but over the years I've been a trainer, consultant, contractor, and DBA. I'm rarely present on social media, the best way to contact me is here, LinkedIn, or via email.

Blog Post

Splitting up the Mission of PASS

Following up on Should There Be A Successor to PASS? I have a couple more thoughts. One of the many complaints about PASS over the years was about perceived value....

2021-01-04 (first published: )

539 reads

Blog Post

The 2021 Plan for SQLOrlando

Over the past couple years we’ve been slowly evolving from a fairly adhoc plan of doing what we did last year to a semi structured plan that was mainly...

2020-12-20

45 reads

Blog Post

The Future of PASS

2020 has been a tough year for PASS. It’s primary fund raiser – the PASS Summit – was converted to a virtual event that attracted fewer attendees and far...

2020-12-04 (first published: )

375 reads

Blog Post

Serious Thoughts About PASS

Back when Covid started I guessed that this might be yet another live-or-die challenge for PASS. PASS is heavily dependent on Summit revenue and uses it to fund all...

2020-11-23 (first published: )

276 reads

Blogs

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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Forums

AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA

By inHouseDBA

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

connections vs apis

By stan

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

By stan

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