sqlrider

Alex Stuart is a DBA from Manchester, UK, who levelled up from bartender to application support to accidental DBA to full-time Default Blame Accepter.
Primarily a production DBA fond of performance tuning and upgrades, but known to get hands dirty with whatever tool fits the job - Powershell, C#, ASP.NET, breaker bars.
In summer he rides fast bikes on as many racetracks as he can fit in.
In winter he reads and plays guitar and videogames. Ok, sometimes in summer he also does all of those things.
  • Interests: Technology, philosophy, motorbikes, videogames
  • Skills: Performance tuning, Azure, automation

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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