Bert Wagner

Bert Wagner is a Business Intelligence Developer at Progressive Insurance. He enjoys solving challenging data transformations with T-SQL and optimizing for query performance. In addition to BI development, Bert loves building ASP.NET MVC web apps and building Internet of Things projects.

Blog Post

Displaying Long Values in SSMS

Watch this week's video on YouTube
I write a lot of dynamic SQL and frequently encounter variables that contain many characters:
DECLARE @LongValue NVARCHAR(MAX) = CAST('' AS NVARCHAR(MAX)) +
N'SELECT
...

2018-08-07

7 reads

Blog Post

Displaying Long Values in SSMS

Watch this week's video on YouTube
I write a lot of dynamic SQL and frequently encounter variables that contain many characters:
DECLARE @LongValue NVARCHAR(MAX) = CAST('' AS NVARCHAR(MAX)) +
N'SELECT
...

2018-08-07

12 reads

Blog Post

Should You Use Index Hints?

Watch this week's video on YouTube
One of the things that the SQL Server query optimizer does is determine how to retrieve the data requested by your query.
Usually it does...

2018-07-31

7 reads

Blog Post

Should You Use Index Hints?

Watch this week's video on YouTube
One of the things that the SQL Server query optimizer does is determine how to retrieve the data requested by your query.
Usually it does...

2018-07-31

7 reads

Blogs

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Something has shifted quietly in 2026. The developers I know/respect—the ones actually shipping, not...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning

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Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention

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Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...

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Forums

Dynamic Unpivot

By pietlinden

I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...

Writing as an Art and a Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Writing as an Art and...

String Similarity II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item String Similarity II

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Question of the Day

String Similarity II

What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?

See possible answers