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The SQL Server Black Box

Have you ever had the problem where a user ran a query against your SQL Serer and crashed it or made the server unusable since the CPU was spiked at 100%? A SQL Server black box is the equivalent of a flight data record. The black box records all queries being passed to your SQL Server and other useful information like errors.

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Standards Are a Good Thing

This week we have another article from Andy that discusses some changes he made at work in conjunction with clustering all his database servers. Not a how-to, just comments about what was changed and why. Worth reading just for the reminder about the potential gotcha that @@ServerName can represent.

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Free Webcast Today: SQL Server Security Best Practices

Join SQLServerCentral.com co-founder Brian Knight for this free webcast on SQL Server security best practices. In this session on Technet, we will look at how to protect your system from internal and external security factors. We will look at the types of permissions in your database objects, implementing column and row-level security, and protecting yourself from SQL Injection attacks. We'll also cover best practices for basic and advanced protection for your SQL Server system.

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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