James Phillips is a Sr. Consultant with Pragmatic Works and has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. James lives in Northwest New Jersey with his wife Amy and has 4 children: Hannah, Lillian, John and James Jr. He has spoken at several SQL Saturday events over the past few years and is the Leader of the PASS New Jersey SQL Server User group. His focus is mainly on SQL Server Performance as well as SSIS and SSAS technologies.

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Blogs

ADF Pipeline Debugging Fails with BadRequest – The Sequel

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A while ago I blogged about a use case where a pipeline fails during...

Why I stopped using MCP for AI coding stuff

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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...

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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?

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