Idera has a new FreeWare version of their SQLsafe tool for backup and recovery of SQL Server databases. They've also added freeware versions of their performance monitoring tool and are preparing more free tools...
Quite often we come across a requirement where we may need to perform some sort of fuzzy string grouping or data correlation. For example, we may want to correlate the customer records of a database by identifying records that are similar but not necessarily exactly the same (due to spelling mistakes for example). Obviously a simple group by, will not successfully group such data. We will need to employ what is commonly referred to as a distance algorithm or a string metric in order to determine how close 2 string values are.