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SQLServerCentral Article

Windows Clustered MSDTC and SQL Server 2019 mishap

Introduction As you may know, in the early days of SQL Server Clustering, Microsoft advised to provide each clustered SQL Server instance with its own Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) resource. Since SQL Server 2012 this advice has been withdrawn. Microsoft now recommends to provide your instance with its own MSDTC resource, once you notice the […]

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2025-04-04

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SQLServerCentral Article

Logon monitoring in SQL Server and Azure Managed Instances - Adopting Extended Events

Intro In 2008 I wrote an article called “Scope: The drastic caveat with Logon Triggers.” Ever since, we have been using Event Notifications to capture logins for our SQL Server instances. Issues were only very rare, usually on servers that had an extreme load of many connections. In such a case, we stopped this continuous monitoring and […]

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2021-10-29

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Question of the Day

The Decoded Value

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:

DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!';
DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX);

SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000)));
SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded) 

See possible answers