Articles

External Article

Empty Thoughts: Working with NULL

Whether or not to have NULLable columns in a table can be a religious debate, and how missing data is represented should be carefully considered during database design. In this article, Joe Celko considers the ways that SQL Server handles NULLs in several situations.

2019-02-11

3,289 reads

External Article

Protecting SQL Server Data Using Static Data Masking

In order to protect data and comply with regulations such as the GDPR and HIPAA, databases used by developers and testers must not contain private and sensitive data from production databases. To help DBAs protect data, Microsoft have released a new feature as part of SSMS called Static Data Masking. In this article, Greg Larsen demonstrates how to use this new feature.

2019-02-07

2,794 reads

External Article

Better Code Reviews with GIT

As more dev teams move their code to Git, it’s important to understand the differences between it and other tools they have used in the past. In this article, Michael Sorens provides some good advice about doing code reviews with Git.

2019-02-05

3,221 reads

Blogs

The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world

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Forums

Database backup job steps

By Pete Bishop

I have a SQL Agent job for backing up a set of Analysis Services...

SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression Algorithm

By Johan Bijnens

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression...

The Large Encoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Large Encoded Value

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

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