Technical Article

#sp_shrinkdata

Unlike shrinking transaction log, shrinking a data file seems to be tough. A lot of people complained about the "shrink database" option in EM not working, or DBCC SHRINKDATABASE not working, or DBCC SHRINKFILE not working. I have found that a data file will eventually shrink given enough try, time and patience. I've put everything […]

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2003-01-14

412 reads

Technical Article

sp_kill

This stored proc has helped me a lot when I needed to restore db, reconfigure replication, and do other database jobs. SQL server KILL command can only act on a single spid. This sp compiles KILL commands in a cursor to kill a group of spids based on database name, login name, host machine name […]

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2002-11-11

6,083 reads

Technical Article

sp_checksqlversion

How many times have you seen @@version return a number but failed to interpret what service pack it is? Although SQL 2000 gives a gift (SERVERPROPERTY) of querying a readable value, my script will remedy the puzzle and show more parameters such as CPU speed, memory, windows version, and installation date. The limitations are:1. MSDE […]

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2002-10-16

461 reads

Technical Article

sp_checksize

This stored procedure checks the sizes of one or all databases (including total data, total log, data used/free, data used/free percentage, log used/free, log used/free percentage). If a database name is provided, it will only check the given db. If no parameters provided, all dbs will be checked and the total size of all dbs […]

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2002-10-01

1,037 reads

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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