T-SQL Tuesday #193 – Notes to past and future me
The last T-SQL Tuesday of the year is hosted by my good friend Mike Walsh. Mike’s call for us is to end the year on a poignant note –...
2025-12-24 (first published: 2025-12-09)
145 reads
Blog Posts
Enterprise AI Operating Rhythm – Top 5 practices for 2026
2025 exposed a growing gap between AI ambition and operational reality. As budgets tightened and pilots stalled, organizations across industries faced the same challenge: turning AI expectations into sustainable...
2025-12-22
25 reads
More fun with Git: git restore
The setup My day job involves babysitting a lot of Git repositories hosted on GitHub. The vast majority of the commits, merges, and squashes I run on a daily...
2025-12-22 (first published: 2025-12-09)
455 reads
When the Internet Stumbles: Lessons from Cloudflare & Azure Front Door Outages
Recently, the world was reminded of just how fragile the internet can be. Two well established cloud services, Cloudflare and Azure Front Door, both had simultaneous outages that caused...
2025-12-22 (first published: 2025-12-08)
397 reads
A New Word: Etherness
etherness – n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now,...
2025-12-19
132 reads
Prepping for Certification, Part 4 of 4
In Parts 1-3, I covered how I prepare for a certification exam. In this last part, I'll talk about how I go about taking the exam.
2025-12-19 (first published: 2025-12-08)
410 reads
SQL Server – What To Do When Disaster Strikes (5-Point Survival Guide)
SQL Server – What To Do When Disaster Strikes (5-Point Survival Guide)Chill, coffee first.When your SQL Server goes down, alarms are blaring, and managers are hovering, that sentence might...
2025-12-19 (first published: 2025-12-03)
570 reads
4 CPE Opportunity (Virtual) for Charity
Every year, the South Carolina State Internal Auditors Association and the South Carolina Midlands ISACA Chapter partner together to put on a "CPE catchup" opportunity in December to provide...
2025-12-17
16 reads
Quantum Computing and SQL Server Article Is Up
In parallel with the presentation I gave at the PASS Data Community Summit on quantum computing's impact on data, I wrote an article specifically on impact with respect to...
2025-12-17 (first published: 2025-12-03)
233 reads
What’s New at AWS re:Invent 2025 – Day2 Highlights
Day 2 kicked off with Matt Garman’s keynote, and he opened with a quote that instantly stood out as my favorite of the day “Is it possible? …..Why not!...
2025-12-17 (first published: 2025-12-03)
124 reads
Blogs
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Forums
AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
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