Technical Article

Trace-scrubbing Tools

Andrew Zanevsky shares his trace-scrubbing procedures that make it easy for you to handle large trace files and aggregate transactions by type–even when captured T-SQL code has variations.

SQL Server Profiler is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to helping DBAs optimize their T-SQL code. But, the surfeit of riches (I'm reminded of the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin) can be overwhelming. I recently had one of those "sinking" feelings when I first tried to make sense of the enormous amount of data collected by traces on a client's servers. At this particular client, the online transactions processing system executes more than 4 million database transactions per hour. That means that even a 30-minute trace that captures "SQL Batch Completed" events results in a table with 2 million rows. Of course, it's simply impractical to process so many records without some automation, and even selecting the longest or most expensive transactions doesn't necessarily help in identifying bottlenecks. After all, short transactions can be the culprits of poor performance when executed thousands of times per minute.

Blogs

RANK() vs DENSE_RANK(): #SQLNewBlogger

By

I haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I saw an article recently...

Using CAT for Testing of Data Agents

By

In last months one of the scenarios where you can use AI has been...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance

25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral Meant to Me

By Brian Knight

Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral...

Doing Good at SQL Server Central

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Doing Good at SQL Server...

Visit the forum

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