davebem

Dave Bermingham has been an IT professional since 1991. In 2004 he started work at SIOS Technology and began to focus on high availability and disaster recovery solutions for Windows and Linux applications. He has been a Microsoft MVP since 2010 with a current focus on high availability for SQL server and other applications running in the Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. He also maintains the blog Clustering for Mere Mortals where he writes many step-by-step guides and other resources in the area of his expertise. You can commonly find him speaking at SQL Saturday events and other conferences, generally on high availability and disaster recovery options for SQL Server.
  • Interests: high availability, disaster recovery, cloud

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Blogs

Don’t Miss Out – SQL Server Query Tuning Fundamentals Starts Next Monday!

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Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...

Monday Monitor Tips: SQL Auditing Preview

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One of the features we advocates have been advocating for is a better way...

SQL Server 2025 CU1 Fixes the Docker Desktop AVX Issue on macOS

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Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now...

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Forums

25 Years of SQL Server Central

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years of SQL Server...

The Decoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Decoded Value

Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition in Kubernetes: A Cost-Effective Alternative to RDS

By Sujai Krishna

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition...

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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)

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