This was a great article and I really enjoyed reading it. I'm particularly grateful for the excellent explanatory text which meant I could actually follow most of what was going on despite being fairly new to SQL.

At the risk of being overly picky there is one bit I have to query:

"Likewise, the F's are stored as "01000110" in upper-case and "01000110" in lower (if you look closely, you can tell which bit makes it upper or lower case)."

Am I simply not looking closely enough or are these values actually identical? Sneaky typo perhaps?

Anyway thanks for the great article.

All the best,

John