Helping Students with a Data Professional Career
Steve has advice for students looking to become data professionals.
DMV Comparison for SQL Server 2019 vs Azure SQL Database
What DMVs were added to Azure SQL Databases, and which DMVs are missing from Azure SQL Databases but still exist on SQL Server 2019 or other versions?
Deleting a Database
Who among us hasn't deleted a production data file? Steve hopes most of us have not.
Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection
Learn how you can conduct a sentiment analysis on data loaded into an Excel spreadsheet.
Power BI Mistakes to Avoid – Part 2
What advice would you give to someone new to Power BI? What are common Power BI mistakes to avoid? In this article, we will discuss several Power BI mistakes to avoid to help you navigate this powerful tool effectively.
Changing the Paradigm of Work
AI is changing work, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Steve continues to examine and evaluate how GenAI systems might be used in today's world and asks if there is work that might help you.
Stairway to Transaction Log Management in SQL Server, Level 3: Transaction Logs, Backup and Recovery
This article discusses the different types of backup and recovery models and gives the essential facts that will guide you to being able to achieve a recovery of a database to a point in time.
How to Load a Date Dimension in Microsoft Fabric using Macros in dbt?
With the popular data transformation tool dbt (data build tool), we have a bunch of interesting features at our disposal to write SQL more efficiently. One of those features is macros, which we’ll introduce in this article
How to Forecast Data in Power BI
Learn how you can use Power BI to forecase the future trends of data.
More Linux than Windows
Microsoft announced that Linux runs on more machines in Azure than Windows. Steve isn't surprised and thinks that Linux use will continue to grow.
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