Author: Scott McCormick

The Levenshtein Distance, as discussed in my last post, is a way to measure how far two strings are located from each other. There are several T-SQL implementations of this functionality, as well as many compiled versions. In addition, the…

  Fuzzy Search in SQL Server is not done very well. This post will cover how to implement Fuzzy Search capabilities using several approaches.   What is it? Fuzzy Search is the process to locate records that are relevant to…

  Row Level Security (RLS) has been implemented in SQL Server 2016 for both on-premise and v12 of Azure instances. The problem this solves is: a company with multiple applications accessing sensitive data in one or more tables. How do…

  I recently had a client ask how to run SQL Server jobs against an Azure SQL Database, and because SQL DB doesn’t have an SQL Agent like most other versions of SQL Server, it isn’t always obvious how to…

This blog post is a quick introduction to Containers in the Windows world, and a walk-through on installing SQL Server in a Windows Container. Introduction As many of you have heard, Microsoft is jumping into containers with native support for…

The y-cruncher utility is a handy little tool that will calculate digits of Pi using multiple threads, and will report back with detailed information on the duration of each step. This allows a direct 1:1 comparison of CPU performance across…

Amazon has just released their RDS Migration Tool, and Pythian has recently undertaken training to use for our clients. I wanted to share my initial thoughts on the tool, give some background on its internals, and provide a walk-through on the functionality it will be most commonly used for.

This post covers how to create, monitor, maintain, and automatically delete SQL Server backups. What is Azure Storage and why should you use it? Microsoft Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud offering for offsite storage. It offers the ability to seamlessly…

This post is to discuss the Microsoft Planning and Assessment (MAP) toolkit, which is a nice little tool with a few extremely useful features.