Can you explain why you are using varbinary column to store plain text?

In any case here is a small demo that shows you what to do in case that the text is stored as binary data. I recommend that you'll consider using one of the string data types (char, varchar, nchar or nvarchar) instead of varbinary data type.

create table Demo (vb varbinary(100))

go

--Inserting 3 records into the table

insert into Demo (vb)

select convert(varbinary(100),'Why whould you use a varbinary column?')

union

select convert(varbinary(100),'When you store plain text,')

union

select convert(varbinary(100),'you should use one of the strings data type')

go

--Getting all the values as binary values

select vb from Demo

--Getting all the values as string by using convert function

select convert(varchar(100), vb) from Demo

--Getting only one of the records by using convert and like operator

--Notice that this will prevent the use of index, and if the table

--is a big table, you'll might have performance problems.

select convert(varchar(100), vb) from Demo where convert(varchar(100),vb) like '%store%'

go

drop table Demo

Adi