You can just hear it now: At the table down the hall, there’s a group of people having, (as it seems to you) yet another academic discussion on the merits of third-normal form and the structure of primary keys. You’ve heard many discussions like this before — it all seems so pointless. After all, doesn’t it just boil down to “create table” commands and a bunch of DDL? You mastered all that in your first DBA class. What could be so hard?
Building a highly available system is hard. This short white paper from Sonasoft shows some of the differences between a cluster and their standby server product.
SQL Server 2000 had extensions built in to allow you to work with XML data, however, most installations did not work with it. XML has proven that it is a very powerful way of transmitting and working with data, but creating it from relational data has proven to be difficult. New author Hugh Lynch, CTO of Restricted Stock Systems, Inc. brin gs us a method for easily creating XML from your SQL Servers.
Right out of the box, SQL Server 2005 does not install many of its services (such as SQL Server Reporting Services) or does not have features turned on by default (.NET integration), thereby reducing the attack vectors that hackers could use to compromise your data security.
Check digits–not to be confused with checksums–are often added to numeric identifiers such as customer and product numbers to reduce the chance of incorrect entries. Sequences of numbers are notoriously easy to mistype, and constraints alone generally won't do the job. In this excellent article, Lynn Fields shows you how to implement the "Cadillac" of check digit methods–the Verhoeff Dihedral Group.
The fourth part of Steve Jones series looking at employee retention. In this article, he examines a few techniques that can help the employee ensure their own retention.
One of the most difficult database operations to scale-up on high-end server systems is the network call. In fact, without special precautions, a high call volume database application can have severe negative scaling on large systems. It is suspected that this problem is more pronounced on NUMA systems than basic SMP systems. A NUMA system with 16 processors can have significantly lower throughput capability than an otherwise comparable 4-way SMP system.
Auditing, analyzing and documenting your SQL Server installation is becoming more important all the time, especially as more and more attention is being paid to the security of your environment. Chad Miller brings us a look at a framework and a sample document you can use in your environment to conduct an audit.
There is an important technique for creating truly agile databases that I haven’t seen in his writings; one which is well-known to DBAs, but little understood in the application development community – the use of database views to create a layer of abstraction between the normalized relational tables and the applications that use the data.
SQL Server 2000 has a great job and alert subsystem, but it doesn't do everything. There are times when you want to be notified that something has completed, or not completed. New author Frank Loschiavo brings us a way to ensure that when you run a query you are notified if and when it completes.
By Steve Jones
I haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I saw an article recently...
In last months one of the scenarios where you can use AI has been...
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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